Consolidated list of elemental issues for WoD

[desert-wind]

Please tell me if I've missed anything, I want to give a comprehensive list / post to the Designers so it's all in one spot and they don't have to troll through everything and we might actually get a comprehensive response. Don't be afraid to post old issues that have never been addressed either.


Talents

First and foremost, give elemental and enhance different talents, why are we the only class without talents mixed ? even mages fulfilling the same role have themed talents now... why do enhance and ele, fulfilling different roles have matched talents ? Further to this, complete lack of creativity with shaman talents, celestalon commented that we don't have enough earthy or frosty spells? Why not give us 2 100 pt talents that are either frost or earth? Make 2 for ele and 2 for enhance? Make storm ele the 'combined' talent of the tier.

Totem tier is pointless and 0 choice, projection unless fight specifically calls for anti fear. Projection should be baseline, replace with a movement tier.

Healing Tier provides nothing, no choice but AG and AG is bad.

Echo is just straight up retarded for elemental, barely above dps neutral on any fight with movement. clunky and akward on standstill.

Scen 1; You're a good player, you use lava burst prior to moving, echo procs and then surge procs, you use surge because you are a good player, now you are sitting there having used up echo proc but unable to cast the lava burst that you 'gained', before movement ends another surge procs eating your echo, 0 gain. Even if you do eventually get to cast the echo, your still getting more downtime on lavaburst then you should be and are essentially being punished, despite good play, for having your procs happen at a bad time.

Scen 2; echo procs just before lava burst, Perfect!... During your cast surge procs, overwriting your echo. Echo gives you nothing.

Scen 3; you just cast lava burst proccing echo, then echo procs, then echo procs then echo procs then echo procs oh look you got one free lava burst from all your procs and now u get nothing for a minute hurray!

All 3 of these happen regularly, the only way the talent can become comparable is if they make the proc rate obscene. It's annoying and frustrating to play with at best.

Bonus Scen 4; it essentially gives you nothing during ascendance.

Super bonus scen 5; before you mention EQ, EQ is hardly useful in the first place being able to cast it twice does not make it more useful. The chance of it even proccing conveniently mid pull when you need it is low to begin with, and then the scenarios where EQ is even used are even more rare... Not even worth discussing the 1/1000000000 times it will be amazing.


Fusion = boring, hard to make work without making ridiculous. Highlighted by the recent changes to ES that aren't working without breaking our ST rotation.

SET = 5 min cd, why would anyone want this and is a hybrid pile of turd. and boring.

Magma spew, cool looking, decent talent, lack of control sucks on fights where you only want it to hit certain things, very situational, tied to searing totem is stupid.

Issues with rotation;

Lavaburst hits for shit all, is our primary nuke, and is being held back because of how OP it COULD be WITH 75% overloads being such a high contribution. Our mastery is gone now, why is LVB still garbage.

Searing totem should be culled in ability pruning, no shaman wants this to stay. You finally completely untied shaman dps from it by removing searing flames, and then added a talent to interact with it when the logical thing was to nuke the talent :I

New mastery is either going to be too strong or too weak for ST. If it's well balanced, due to haste crit multi and vers all boosting mastery damage, it will stay in line with whatever amount of mastery you have, whereas increasing mastery does nothing for other contributers... This means as you gain more mastery it becomes a larger portion of your dps. As it is already 20% in starter gear trying to avoid mastery im fearful of where this will end up.

Recent Numbers Pass: There's now a whole slew of issues with the recent numbers pass but I feel like some of them are more errors then intended design direction so I won't bring them up.

The whole EQ shamozle.. Having a cast time ground targetted cd based aoe which needs to be buffed by another cast time spell once the adds are already present is the most backwards arse spell in the game... EQ needs to last 4 seconds on targets to be worth casting for aoe in the first place, so 2 seconds of CL + 2 seconds to cast EQ + 4 seconds ... most adds won't last that long... or stay still that long... It's just dumb, buff CL and be done with it.

Other Issues

Lack of mobility. While other classes have evolved in different ways without movement while casting, elemental has not evolved at all, being reliant on moving LB. As clear examples, both druids and mages have movement talent tiers, warlocks have high durability (they dont have to move as much) as well as resources (they can build and spend to gain advantages whilst stationary vs our linear dps), hunters have 100% movement and spriests have high ticking dots (even in their relatively 'weak' state on live, they compete with ele on single target and crush us on split targets). Elemental has no blink, has no mobility tier... all we have is ghostwolf that is outdated and the worst movement mechanic in the game (it silences u and is slow) and this new UE sprint. The ue sprint is better than nothing, I will grant, but does nothing for people playing with the UF talent, and is a 'poor mans' version for any comparation between classes.
The mages movement tier is so strong, and goes to the class that has blink baseline... Elemental could 100% use that tier not only balance wise but thematically.

Ghost Wolf; this ability used to be a top tier movement ability, as other classes have evolved it has dropped further and further down the totem pole to the point now that it is litterally the worst movement ability in the game and basically is rarely used unless you are out of a position in a raid environment.

Melee training. Any competent melee currently can train the hell out of elemental except for maybe a DK if you play excellently. Without moving LB, and with no removal of gap closers on melee, and the reduction of burst so significantly (our one real defense) we will just get trained to death and might as well afk in pvp on WoD.

Lack of Raid Usefulness: More of an overarching concern where that elemental doesn't really bring *anything* to the raid anymore... Even if tuning works out in our favour and we are above average on dps. Our off heals are weak / non existant, we have no immunity, barely anything unique we can do, poor at movement to do mechanics, slow in general, bad at target switching... We just can't do things as well as other classes... in the past it didn't matter that we were a bit clunky because we could bring amazing off heals, and some utility, but now that 'all dps are equal theme' is come to the forefront, all the clunkiness and junk of the spec is starting to show up and fall apart.

[Deleted]

inb4 "wait for the damage passes" .. haha

Thanks for the work, but we wont change anything at this stage. You'll just lose nerves to the people coming to your thread, argueing that everything is fine.

[Deleted]

Ahhhh I'm going to enjoy going through everything in this list. Grab some popcorn - it's about to get tasty.

First and foremost, give elemental and enhance different talents, why are we the only class without talents mixed ? even mages fulfilling the same role have themed talents now... why do enhance and ele, fulfilling different roles have matched talents ?

You need to give examples of things that don't make sense and solutions to the problem. What talents are problematic?

Totem tier is pointless and 0 choice, projection unless fight specifically calls for anti fear. Projection should be baseline, replace with a movement tier.

They've acknowledged that it's bland but there's no need to change it yet because it's such a low priority, and I agree with them. I make a conscious choice between Projection and Call of the Elements all the time, and get good usage out of both.

Healing Tier provides nothing, no choice but AG and AG is bad.

AG is currently the single best off-healing cooldown available in the game (imho), to be able to couple it with Ascendance and do upwards of 5 million healing over 10 seconds is obscene. This has been nerfed into the ground in Warlords and I have no doubt that other talents will be viable in places. Also, not every talent needs to be viable for every spec, a design philosophy that Blizzard has stated in the past.

Echo is just straight up retarded for elemental, barely above dps neutral on any fight with movement. clunky and akward on standstill. I can and have previously give a more in depth analysis of this, but in short it just does not work.

I have no issues with the new Echo after getting used to not being able to use it instantly as with Lava Surge. In AoE situations it makes Earthquake unbelievably powerful, and I'll be enjoying this.

Fusion = boring, hard to make work without making ridiculous.

100% agree - I made a thread about this on the forums about how underpowered and underwhelming it is, however now that they've buffed it a little, and dramatically nerfed Liquid Magma, it may have some use on single target, but I doubt it.

SET = 5 min cd, why would anyone want this and is a hybrid pile of turd. and boring.

It's just an off-healing cooldown, for extended AoE burst periods like Rampage or Fist Smash. It's situational but likely to have some use in places.

Magma spew, cool looking, decent talent, lack of control sucks on fights where you only want it to hit certain things, very situational, tied to searing totem is stupid.

I don't believe it targets CC'd targets which removes a massive potential flaw, but what fights are you concerned about?

Issues with rotation;

Lavaburst hits for shit all, is our primary nuke, and is being held back because of how OP it COULD be WITH 75% overloads being such a high contribution. Our mastery is gone now, why is LVB still garbage.

Because our mastery is a somewhat powerful single target damage increase, Lava Burst doesn't need to hit 75% harder just because we lost our old mastery. This is only one spell, and bears no resemblance to the power of the spec as a whole, it's pretty pointless to say this one spell sucks when all the others make up the total DPS spread.

Searing totem should be culled in ability pruning, no shaman wants this to stay. You finally completely untied shaman dps from it by removing searing flames, and then added a talent to interact with it when the logical thing was to nuke the talent :I

50/50 on this - if it's powerful enough to be worthwhile then it's an interesting DoT. Right now on live I don't even use it, but it has been buffed so if it's worth the global then it promotes making good use of it.

New mastery is either going to be too strong or too weak for ST. If it's well balanced, due to haste crit multi and vers all boosting mastery damage, it will stay in line with whatever amount of mastery you have, whereas increasing mastery does nothing for other contributers... This means as you gain more mastery it becomes a larger portion of your dps. As it is already 20% in starter gear trying to avoid mastery im fearful of where this will end up.

Somewhat tied in with Lava Burst, you can't say "LvB is too weak and ME is too strong" - they tie in together as a part of the whole package. If it scales too well or too badly then it can be changed, I don't see this as a problem.

The whole EQ shamozle.. Having a cast time ground targetted cd based aoe which needs to be buffed by another cast time spell once the adds are already present is the most backwards arse spell in the game... EQ needs to last 4 seconds on targets to be worth casting for aoe in the first place, so 2 seconds of CL + 2 seconds to cast EQ + 4 seconds ... most adds won't last that long... or stay still that long... It's just dumb, buff CL and be done with it.

Earthquake is unbelievably powerful right now, and I'm enjoying having it in our rotation since the cast time increase on Chain Lightning. Spamming 1.0 sec CLs and interweaving Earthquake was awkward and fiddly, but now that it's slower paced, it feels nicer to work those Earthquakes in there, and there's some decision making involved in order to make the most out of it, not to mention the addition of the new Echo procs and the levelling perk - it actually feels nice to use and it's really powerful.

Other Issues

Lack of mobility. While other classes have evolved in different ways without movement while casting, elemental has not evolved at all, being reliant on moving LB. As clear examples, both druids and mages have movement talent tiers, warlocks have high durability (they dont have to move as much) as well as resources (they can build and spend to gain advantages whilst stationary vs our linear dps), hunters have 100% movement and spriests have high ticking dots (even in their relatively 'weak' state on live, they compete with ele on single target and crush us on split targets). Elemental has no blink, has no mobility tier... all we have is ghostwolf that is outdated and the worst movement mechanic in the game (it silences u and is slow) and this new UE sprint. The ue sprint is better than nothing, I will grant, but does nothing for people playing with the UF talent, and is a 'poor mans' version for any comparation between classes.
The mages movement tier is so strong, and goes to the class that has blink baseline... Elemental could 100% use that tier not only balance wise but thematically.

I was very worried about mobility, I still find myself moving whilst casting and frustrating myself at my stupidity in doing so, but I'm slowly getting used to it. The UE sprint is helpful for sure, but don't forget Spiritwalker's Grace - a 15 (or 20) second movement ability on a 2-minute cooldown, or a 7 second movement ability on a 60 second cooldown will turn out to be very useful. We also have 4 options for whilst we're moving: Searing Totem placement, Lava Surge proc, Shock cooldown, or UE cast. Four potential things we can do to enhance our DPS on the move is not insignificant, and if anything really raises the skill cap instead of mindless LB spam on the move. So I'm not excited about it, but it's certainly not unplayable by any means.

Lack of Raid Usefulness: More of an overarching concern where that elemental doesn't really bring *anything* to the raid anymore... Even if tuning works out in our favour and we are above average on dps. Our off heals are weak / non existant, we have no immunity, barely anything unique we can do, poor at movement to do mechanics, slow in general, bad at target switching... We just can't do things as well as other classes... in the past it didn't matter that we were a bit clunky because we could bring amazing off heals, and some utility, but now that 'all dps are equal theme' is come to the forefront, all the clunkiness and junk of the spec is starting to show up and fall apart.

With the glyph of Shamanistic Rage and Astral Shift we can have a pretty tasty 76% damage reduction for 6 seconds, which is not insignificant at all! That would allow soaking of quite a few abilities, think Titan Sparks on Will of the Emperor. We do still bring off-healing - remember that every class has had their off-healing nerfed, not just Shaman - priests have it quite bad now as well. Our totem utility is excellent, to be able to tremor, ground, capacitor, it's useful stuff to have. Our AoE on 5 targets will be second to none still, so fights like Lei Shen go really well. Our movement is not as bad as you think, the amount of instants we have still makes it possible to be useful.

All in all there are some areas I'm not excited about, but I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as people are trying to make it out to be.

[Deleted]

We're talking from a 6.0 point of view, Zeruge. Unless you didnt notice it.

[Deleted]

I know...? What part of my post made you think I'm not? Potentially the part where I compare current AG to 6.0 AG?

It can't have been the parts where I mentioned the new Echo of the Elements, Elemental Fusion, Storm Elemental Totem, Liquid Magma, Lava Burst, the new mastery, Searing Totem, the new mastery for a second time, Earthquake being powerful, the increased Chain Lightning cast time, or how useful all the new glyphs and perks are... So you can forgive me for wondering what you're on about

[Deleted]

Several skills you pointed out how they work in 5.4 - which doesnt matter at all. Elemental is trimmed in 6.0 - and most of your stuff is already old and got changed.

[Deleted]

Such as...?

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I'll save you the trouble while I wait for my raid to start. Let's see... what abilities did I mention...

Totemic Projection - Identical on 5.4 and 6.0
Call of the Elements - Identical on 5.4 and 6.0
Ancestral Guidance - Clearly explained how it has been nerfed in 6.0
Echo of the Elements - Mentioned use with Earthquake, obvious reference to 6.0 change
Elemental Fusion - Doesn't even exist in 5.4
Storm Elemental Totem - Doesn't even exist in 5.4
Liquid Magma - Doesn't even exist in 5.4
Lava Burst - Mentioned losing old mastery - obvious reference to 6.0
Searing Totem - Compared to live, mentioned it being buffed and is worth global - obvious reference to 6.0
Molten Earth - Doesn't even exist in 5.4
Earthquake - "Unbelievably powerful" cannot possibly describe this ability in 5.4
Chain Lightning - Increased cast time is obvious reference to 6.0
Levelling Perk - Doesn't even exist in 5.4
Inability to move while casting - Obvious reference to 6.0
Unleashed Elements Perk - Doesn't even exist in 5.4
Spiritwalker's Grace - Mentioned the glyph which doesn't even exist in 5.4
Shamanistic Rage - Mentioned the glyph which doesn't even exist in 5.4
Astral Shift - Identical on 5.4 and 6.0
Tremor Totem - Still breaks fear effects and is useful utility
Capacitor Totem - Identical on 5.4 and 6.0
Grounding Totem - Identical on 5.4 and 6.0

I think that's everything.

So yep, clearly must be talking about 5.4. How about you actually read my post before commenting on it instead of picking up on arbitrary key words next time?

Cheers bro.

[desert-wind]

Have you actually done any of the raid testing? EQ was semi useful on the furnace fight and more because of the rng knockdown then as a dps contribute, that was about it.

I don't care if molten earth and lava burst are balanced, i care that it is fucking ridiculous to have such a huge contributor of our dps be passive, whilst they nerf the active skill component of the class to be about the same overall contribution in STARTER gear. molten earth will be our top damage source in the middle of next tier, f that.

Searing totem being meaningful is bad for pvp.

A full ascendance Lava beam AG heals for less than a single healthstone in a raid environment. Druids and priest offheal cds are still meaningful.

If you read my comments on mobility thoroughly, you would have noticed that I'm not worried about moving LB going, i'm saying that with elemental the way it is (because we had the LB crutch), we have not gained the tools over the previous years to be competing with the other dps classes to deal with various array of mechanics. Other classes either have blink / disengage / cat leap or high damage reduction abilities to allow them to deal with mechanics.

Mages are the ultimate example, they have blink baseline which is better then everything we have combined one global and you're set. On top of that one of their specs have up to 5 charges of instants, whilst another has a cast while moving ability. Further to this they have an entire tier devoted to movement. Evanescence is literally a god tier spell, complete mechanic avoidance on a 45 second cooldown, with the option to talent for an instant reset ? blazing speed is a nice combination of cd and usefullness, and ice floes shits all over SWG. Oh as a side note, amplify magic is by far the best dps cooldown at the moment, because it amplifies all your heals as WELL as any other healing cd. it essentially double dips. Because even if AG was equal to it in general, if you use it and AG at the same time, it makes the AG better as well~

SPriest have powerful dots to make up for their weakness. Locks have the wax and wane style gameplay that comes with their resources. they can maximise still time / trinke time. we have linear dps so movement tanks us a bit. Yes blizzard has upped our ability to dps on the move, but other classes either don't have to move in general, or have better contributions (and skill actually has a bigger role to play).

It's not a case of me getting used to movement or echo, I got used to movement instantly, and echo is just complete trash that works against itself because lava surge is a better, and more dominant mechanic on the same ability.

As to liquid magma, the dude with all the beasts, it goes and hits the spears when u want it on the boss / pets is the prime example I can think of. Or the hands on that dude, u can't control which hands it hits, it hits target with noone in them ?

FYI 76% is a HUGE distance from 100% or 90%. and I think our combo is on a longer CD then a number of them too~

- - - Updated - - -

inb4 "wait for the damage passes" .. haha

Thanks for the work, but we wont change anything at this stage. You'll just lose nerves to the people coming to your thread, argueing that everything is fine.

The purpose is to get a few other shamans posting / make sure I have not missed anything crucial, and put it as a fresh post on the bnet forums and tweet it @celestalon.

- - - Updated - - -

You need to give examples of things that don't make sense and solutions to the problem. What talents are problematic?

I forgot to reply to this... Why are they able to be creative for pretty much every class in the game but shamans... We have all these clunky, dated mechanics that make us think the devs don't spend enough time on shaman / understand the class / care. This is compounded when they do things like give us entire tiers of abilities that are the same for ele / enh / resto. They finally caved on the resto component (most likely due to not being able to think of more bandaids that worked for all 3). and yet the dps talents we did get are a boring pile of crap anyway.

There is so much room for ideas and improvements... They say we don't have enough elemental diversity yet they don't use it at all in our talents? too much fire, heres magma spew shit ? SHOCK AMP ?!!?? wtf give us some cool frost ability give us some cool water ability...

Wanna know the problem ? For all of WoD here we go... from the bottom up

"CC tier". Frost shock talent completely unviable for elemental due to core mechanics removing ability to use frost shock.

Totem tier, anything but projection is dumb for ele outside of specific circumstances.

First dps tier, EM worthless for ele, middle tier worthless for dps outside of tier, echo meh and boring.

Healing tier, 2 options completely unviable for dps, conductivity a huge enormous joke / trap for even resto.

Final tier, EB FOR RESTO !?!? LOL EB FOR ENHANCE ? almost as much of a joke.

They could have made EB an instant that actually applied all 3 shocks at any time, it has the animation for it, it would have made sense and been actually interesting for all 3 specs and viable, instead it's basically a straight damage nuke with a chance to be fucking worthless.

it's something i pointed out at the start of MoP and I'm pointing it out again now, no long term thought / design goes into any of the shaman specs .

We get the most boring, confusing and 'meh' talents out of all of the classes.

I'll end this with why I think that is the case, they don't look @ elemental and go, ok lets design 3 talents for ele that have cool effects and integrate or impact on the spec in some way. Then look @ enhance the same way and resto the same way.

They go, ok how can we make 3 talents that they can all use to some extent... yes this time they split hps / dps but we still got "makes shocks better" '5 min cd' and "something tied to searing totem"

None of them are interesting or tie in to either spec, they don't have anything to do with playing ele or enh, they're just 'there'.

At least tier 90 seemed half arsed, this time it's "can't be arsed".

On the plus side that gave me another point, the complete lack of creativity in the shaman department.

[Deleted]

I'm led to believe Frozen Power is a PvP talent, and the other two in that row get great usage.
Not true. I switch between Call of the Elements and Projection a lot, especially on progress. Tip: Your healers will love you for it.
All of these talents equate to a very similar increase of DPS. Elemental Mastery is actually crucial in Challenge Modes. Swiftness might actually have usage in Warlords because it allows an instant, and Echo is great when utilised properly in Warlords.
Conductivity is not useful for Elemental because not every talent has to be useful in every situation, that's by their own admission. AG has been horribly nerfed in Warlords to Streams may have some use.
Elemental Blast giving spirit for resto will be really nice for them, and I feel it may have competitive use for healers who need mana regen. I enjoy Elemental Blast as is.

Maybe I'm just a bit more chillax than most of the MMOC Shaman but it's not that big a deal, really. Some of the talents are a bit crap, there's no denying that, and they've said they'll get round to redoing the totem tier, but it's such a low priority because it sees good usage right now. But overall I think people just find it easier to complain than to focus on the positives - It's understandable human nature. I think we're like 90% fine.

[Taalyn]

Your issue with movement sounds more like I want what they have than our tools need improvement.

[Deleted]

What is your qualification to be able to define "elemental issues" in a game? What solutions do you offer?

NVM..anyone offering lines like "just straight up retarded" as an argument has lost all credibility already.

Thanks for the input.

[shamantime]

Our mastery does a lot of damage, and I feel Blizzard did that because we were severely lacking in the constant damage department, because of that many people are hopping on the buff LvB train. As much as I want to see LvB buffed it would mean and nerf in the constant damage department.

I agree with the unique talents between Elemental and Enhancement. When I think same talents between specs I would think more toward pure dps classes. The fact that Elemental and Enhancement have no unique talents between one another goes to show that the ideas for Shaman are really limited and there could be so much potential.

[desert-wind]

What is your qualification to be able to define "elemental issues" in a game? What solutions do you offer?

NVM..anyone offering lines like "just straight up retarded" as an argument has lost all credibility already.

Having a talent essentially do exactly the same thing as a core mechanic in a worse and clunky / anti functional way is 'straight up retarded.' As I said i've made lengthy posts on it before, and anyone who cares to try it / research it will understand that it does not work, didn't feel like it needed a full lengthy discussion on it again.

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I'm led to believe Frozen Power is a PvP talent, and the other two in that row get great usage.

Does not change that it is essentially unusable by elemental.

Not true. I switch between Call of the Elements and Projection a lot, especially on progress. Tip: Your healers will love you for it.

Tip: No. So I can drop another healing stream ? are you kidding... and on WoD it's even worse it heals for 500 a tick on a 250k hp... yea no, never, ever worth the global. I take it you're not in a high end progression guild by any definition of high end?

All of these talents equate to a very similar increase of DPS. Elemental Mastery is actually crucial in Challenge Modes. Swiftness might actually have usage in Warlords because it allows an instant, and Echo is great when utilised properly in Warlords.

EM is only good until X haste, with meta gem gone it will be the go to talent. AS is definitely more viable with moving LB going. Echo has nothing to do with being utilised properly; listen, there are at least 3 scenarios off the top of my head that Echo does not work:

Scen 1; You're a good player, you use lava burst prior to moving, echo procs and then surge procs, you use surge because you are a good player, now you are sitting there having used up echo proc but unable to cast the lava burst that you 'gained', before movement ends another surge procs eating your echo, 0 gain. Even if you do eventually get to cast the echo, your still getting more downtime on lavaburst then you should be and are essentially being punished, despite good play, for having your procs happen at a bad time.

Scen 2; echo procs just before lava burst, Perfect!... During your cast surge procs, overwriting your echo. Echo gives you nothing.

Scen 3; you just cast lava burst proccing echo, then echo procs, then echo procs then echo procs then echo procs oh look you got one free lava burst from all your procs and now u get nothing for a minute hurray!

All 3 of these happen regularly, the only way the talent can become comparable is if they make the proc rate obscene. It's annoying and frustrating to play with at best.

Bonus Scen 4; it essentially gives you nothing during ascendance.

Super bonus scen 5; before you mention EQ, EQ is hardly useful in the first place being able to cast it twice does not make it more useful. The chance of it even proccing conveniently mid pull when you need it is low to begin with, and then the scenarios where EQ is even used are even more rare... Not even worth discussing the 1/1000000000 times it will be amazing.

Conductivity is not useful for Elemental because not every talent has to be useful in every situation, that's by their own admission. AG has been horribly nerfed in Warlords to Streams may have some use.

Conductivity is not useful for any spec, fixed. Streams will not have any use, it heals for 500 on a 250k hp pool. I considered it might be viable to spread the temp defensive buff with the glyph, btu they removed that functionality from rushing streams, so only 1 person gets the buff. IT is not a viable talent, none of them are, there is no point in picking anything but AG, and AG does practically nothing.

Elemental Blast giving spirit for resto will be really nice for them, and I feel it may have competitive use for healers who need mana regen. I enjoy Elemental Blast as is.

Yes, and it was because of people like me continually posting and harassing that this finally happened, this was an issue PRE MOP. everyone was like !? for this entire tier for resto.

Maybe I'm just a bit more chillax than most of the MMOC Shaman but it's not that big a deal, really. Some of the talents are a bit crap, there's no denying that, and they've said they'll get round to redoing the totem tier, but it's such a low priority because it sees good usage right now. But overall I think people just find it easier to complain than to focus on the positives - It's understandable human nature. I think we're like 90% fine.

Most of our talents are crap or boring. The totem tier they will "get too" here i'll do it instantly, for both dps specs give us evanesence and blazing speed and ice floes (remove SWG from the class). make projection baseline, make the double totem talent baseline.

[Regorill]

Full disclosure off the bat, I'm not in in wod beta.. but haven't liked much of anything I've seen for ele so far.

I have mained my ele shaman for 3 exansions now in a competitive raiding environment and gathered a lot experience. Along the way I have had a chance to raid with different roles/classes as well, and the more I branch out into other classes the more I realize how lazy and tired most ele mechanics are.

As mentioned by above posters, every single talent tier for ele shaman has talents that are either mediocre borderline bad or completely useless; none of them interesting whatsoever from a gameplay point of view. Totemic projection is a great example of something that should be baseline for shaman, but its on a talent tier likely because blizzard had literally no other talent ideas. I often look enviously at my paladin, druid, death knight alts with interesting choices to make that affect gameplay. Wish blizzard would spend a little more time on shaman =/

When it comes right down to it, I'm not *too* worried about the actual numbers.. they're looking fine and I'm sure they're doing their best to make sure most specs are close-ish across a tier. What does worry me (again as mentioned by posters above) is a lack of any reason to bring an ele in wod. They have nothing that stands out; at this point they seem to be clunky and highly movement hindered, and they have no meaningful raid contribution other than damage.

We'll see how it all plays out.. but I mained resto through the first tier of cata when it was literally the shittiest healing spec, and that wasn't fun - if things aren't looking up for ele I'll probably be begrudgingly raiding on an alt.

[Deleted]

Does not change that it is essentially unusable by elemental.

Repeat: Not every talent needs to be useful for every spec.

Tip: No. So I can drop another healing stream ? are you kidding... and on WoD it's even worse it heals for 500 a tick on a 250k hp... yea no, never, ever worth the global. I take it you're not in a high end progression guild by any definition of high end?

Extra Tremor, Capacitor, Healing Stream, Windwalk and Stone Bulwark say hi. Ironic that you're trying to attack me personally by mentioning my potential progression. Perhaps you should think outside the box if you want to be good at your class. I can mitigate every Shock Pulse, every Whirling, every Interrupting Jolt, every Jade Tempest. I can break fear twice on Garrosh, I can stun two packs of adds in CMs, I can cleanse the Brewmaster Spirit's Dizzying Haze twice, and plenty more. Inb4 BUT UR RADE MUST SUK IF DEY GETTING HIT BY DAT TROLOLOLOL. Fact: I'm not talking solely about myself every time I mention how useful something is. There are probably a million Shaman, and all will find use out of some or all of those.

EM is only good until X haste, with meta gem gone it will be the go to talent. AS is definitely more viable with moving LB going. Echo has nothing to do with being utilised properly; listen, there are at least 3 scenarios off the top of my head that Echo does not work:

Scen 1; You're a good player, you use lava burst prior to moving, echo procs and then surge procs, you use surge because you are a good player, now you are sitting there having used up echo proc but unable to cast the lava burst that you 'gained', before movement ends another surge procs eating your echo, 0 gain. Even if you do eventually get to cast the echo, your still getting more downtime on lavaburst then you should be and are essentially being punished, despite good play, for having your procs happen at a bad time.

Scen 2; echo procs just before lava burst, Perfect!... During your cast surge procs, overwriting your echo. Echo gives you nothing.

Scen 3; you just cast lava burst proccing echo, then echo procs, then echo procs then echo procs then echo procs oh look you got one free lava burst from all your procs and now u get nothing for a minute hurray!

All 3 of these happen regularly, the only way the talent can become comparable is if they make the proc rate obscene. It's annoying and frustrating to play with at best.

Bonus Scen 4; it essentially gives you nothing during ascendance.

Super bonus scen 5; before you mention EQ, EQ is hardly useful in the first place being able to cast it twice does not make it more useful. The chance of it even proccing conveniently mid pull when you need it is low to begin with, and then the scenarios where EQ is even used are even more rare... Not even worth discussing the 1/1000000000 times it will be amazing.

EM: Challenge modes.

1) Echo lasts 20 seconds, if you're moving for that long you're doing it wrong.

2) They are mutually exclusive. Surge does not eat Echo and vice versa. I'll log on to the beta after work to double check that. Edit: Turns out that this actually is an issue, apologies, however I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be this way, I imagine that's just a bug atm.

3) You mean like every other RPPM proc in the game? I like RPPM. Just because you don't, doesn't mean nobody else does.

4) So what? It's useful for the remaining 91.66% of the fight, which, as I'm sure you can tell, is not an insignificant percentage.

5) Earthquake is unbelievably useful, with 5 stacks it only has to tick 3 times and it's worth the cast time. I'm starting to think you've not even tested this =/

Conductivity is not useful for any spec, fixed.

Low geared resto on Thok.

Streams will not have any use, it heals for 500 on a 250k hp pool. I considered it might be viable to spread the temp defensive buff with the glyph, btu they removed that functionality from rushing streams, so only 1 person gets the buff. IT is not a viable talent, none of them are, there is no point in picking anything but AG, and AG does practically nothing.

Questing with a friend.

Yes, and it was because of people like me continually posting and harassing that this finally happened, this was an issue PRE MOP. everyone was like !? for this entire tier for resto.

Well done you! Repeat: Not every talent needs to be useful for every spec.

Most of our talents are crap or boring. The totem tier they will "get too" here i'll do it instantly, for both dps specs give us evanesence and blazing speed and ice floes (remove SWG from the class). make projection baseline, make the double totem talent baseline.

Yeahhhhh let's just homogenise everything and copy everything from every other class!

I like SWG.

[shamantime]

I do feel that our talents for some are quite boring but, the fact that you want Evanesce and Blazing Speed and removal of SWG really shows that you are an advocate of homogenization. SWG is one of the best things that Shaman, especially Resto and Ele, could have ever gotten and now you are asking for a downgrade to a lesser version of SWG that allows 3 spell casts? If anything that will make our damage on the move worse off than it is on beta. We should be wanting unique abilities not exact copies of other classes abilities.

[Regorill]

I do feel that our talents for some are quite boring but, the fact that you want Evanesce and Blazing Speed and removal of SWG really shows that you are an advocate of homogenization. SWG is one of the best things that Shaman, especially Resto and Ele, could have ever gotten and now you are asking for a downgrade to a lesser version of SWG that allows 3 spell casts? If anything that will make our damage on the move worse off than it is on beta. We should be wanting unique abilities not exact copies of other classes abilities.

SWG is a great unique spell that shaman have - but it really doesn't address movement issues as well as blizzard would have you believe. Most scenarios where you have to move to respond to a mechanic are >15 seconds.. inevitably you end up at your destination before SWG is over, wasting some of the duration. After that you have no real options for another 120 seconds.

I understand blizzards philosophy in wanting to reduce casting mobility, but OPs point was that they have developed a miriad of tools for other specs to deal with movement over the years.. ele really only got moving LB as a bandaid to improve mobility and now they're removing it without any new solutions.

[shamantime]

SWG is a great unique spell that shaman have - but it really doesn't address movement issues as well as blizzard would have you believe. Most scenarios where you have to move to respond to a mechanic are >15 seconds.. inevitably you end up at your destination before SWG is over, wasting some of the duration. After that you have no real options for another 120 seconds.

I understand blizzards philosophy in wanting to reduce casting mobility, but OPs point was that they have developed a miriad of tools for other specs to deal with movement over the years.. ele really only got moving LB as a bandaid to improve mobility and now they're removing it without any new solutions.

Yea, I know it doesn't fully address our movement problems but, we are much better now than pre-SWG.

[Lavindar]

SWG is a great unique spell that shaman have - but it really doesn't address movement issues as well as blizzard would have you believe. Most scenarios where you have to move to respond to a mechanic are >15 seconds.. inevitably you end up at your destination before SWG is over, wasting some of the duration. After that you have no real options for another 120 seconds.

I understand blizzards philosophy in wanting to reduce casting mobility, but OPs point was that they have developed a miriad of tools for other specs to deal with movement over the years.. ele really only got moving LB as a bandaid to improve mobility and now they're removing it without any new solutions.

The thing is that with 15 seconds it last the whole duration of Ascendence, also, there's the glyph: http://wod.wowhead.com/item=110861

Also in WoD, Elemental mastery will help with movement, not as good as Lightning Bolt, but that was the point of the nerf.

[desert-wind]

I'm using the mage movement tier as an example of things that have been designed that work. Ice floes is VASTLY superior to SWG. On any fight with high movement / or consistent random mechanics (almost every fight in existance) SWG pretty much has to be used with ascendance to get any major benefit form the cd, completely gutting our movement utility. Further to that, most periods of movement are short burts, i.e. one or 2 casts, use one instant, use one charge of ice floes and you're pretty much done with the movement portion. Ice floes is better because it is fragmented and you can use it for the actual cast you have to move for, rather than an all or nothing cd, that with the way elemental works, may only get you one or 2 casts that actually benefit from it. And again, using it outside of ascendance is a trap in most scenarios.