World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

As the patch 8.1.0 information starts to comes out, we wanted to share the current plans of what is being changed for Elemental Shaman.

Core Ability Changes:

• Shifted some damage from Earth Shock to Lightning Bolt.
  
  Elemental Shaman is the only lightning based spell caster. However, over time, Lightning Bolt has gone from being a significant portion of your total damage to one of your least damaging abilities. It should be a powerful and effective spell for you to cast, and not something that feels like a burden to your rotation. Earth Shock will still be your hardest hitting spell, but Lightning Bolt should feel a bit better as part of your rotation.
  
  
• Lava Burst has had its functionality changed behind the scenes to allow an in-flight Lava Burst to gain a guaranteed critical strike from a Flame Shock cast after the Lava Burst has been cast.
  
  This change should help your initial spells cast against a monster, boss, enemy player, or whatever else feel much better. You can cast Lava Burst before combat, and when it finishes, cast Flame Shock, and the Lava Burst will gain the critical strike benefit from your Flame Shock.

Talent Changes:

• The level 15 talent Elemental Blast will now always pick a different secondary stat buff when causing an Elemental Overload.
• The level 30 talent Master of the Elements can now also benefit a Physical damage spell, allowing it to increase the damage of an Earthquake.
• The level 100 talent Stormkeeper now also increases the damage of your next two Lightning Bolts by 250% in addition to its existing effects. This damage bonus will also apply to the Elemental Overloads of Lightning Bolt from Stormkeeper.
  
  The Master of the Elements and Stormkeeper changes are primarily to help keep balance between single target damage and area damage of the talent rows. Master of the Elements will now affect your next Earthquake spell to keep the talent more competitive when dealing area damage, and Stormkeeper will grant you two really powerful Lightning Bolts that also cause Elemental Overloads when fighting just a single target.
  
  
• The level 15 talent Exposed Elements has been removed, and the level 90 talent Earthen Rage has taken its place
• The level 60 talent High Voltage has been removed.
• New talent in the level 60 row: Call the Thunder
• New talent in the level 90 row: Surge of Power

When looking at the whole sum of changes made to Elemental Shaman this expansion, we feel that some of the passive talent choices weren’t holding up well, and had no interaction with how you played the game at all. We’re adding some experimental new talents that should allow some additional decision making on how you choose to use some of your abilities. Please keep in mind that both of these new talents, as well as all of the other changes, are still under iteration and may change entirely throughout the patch 8.1.0 PTR cycle.

Just as a quick update, here's the current version of the experimental new talents that will be hitting the PTR soon. Reminder that these are experimental, the PTR is for testing, we'll probably iterate on or completely replace these designs, etc.

Call the Thunder - Your maximum Maelstrom is increased by 30, and the Maelstrom cost of Earth Shock and Earthquake is reduced by 10.

Surge of Power - Earth Shock also enhances your next spell:

• Flame Shock: The next cast does not incur a cooldown.
• Lightning Bolt: Your next 3 casts will cause an additional Elemental Overload.
• Lava Burst: Reduces the cooldown of your Fire (or Storm) Elemental by 6 sec.
• Frost Shock: Roots the target in place for 6 sec.

Does this mean for example I'm halfway through honored with 7th legion on this toon. If I get on another alt and level through the 3 zones doing the questline that also give 7th legion rep that will count towards rep on this toon as well and I should be revered? Or vice versa all my alts should be halfway honored when they enter bfa?

Rep gain won't be account wide, however progress towards the achievement will.

Say for example I have Character A that I haven't touched since Wrath, that has all of the previous reps exalted (not using exact numbers here just making an example). Let's say we have 20 reputations at exalted on this character that are unique.

Now I play Character B that I haven't touched those reps with, because I just don't want to grind them again. Let's say this character has 40 unique reputations that Character A doesn't have at exalted. Since its the highest progressed character the achievement only looks at this character. Meaning that I just have 40 reps as far as the achievement is concerned.

Now once I've logged into both of those characters when this change is added into the game, I will then receive credit towards the achievement tracker and I would now show as having 60 reputations on that achievement. So I effectively don't have to go back and get those reps again, unless I want to make my Rep window look pretty.

Any word on how it will treat faction exclusive reps?
They will uniquely act as a singular rep to avoid double credit, similar with how mounts are tracked.

So if you have exalted 7th Legion on your Alliance character, and exalted with Honorbound on your Horde. Then your account only has credit for 1 of those 2 reps in the achievement tracker. Account wise they're the same rep.