Thoughts of Elemental in Shadowlands Beta

[soulearth86]

The reality is that the very specific elemental makes sense,

Let's talk about a specific that has nothing of elemental unless you take FrS, and still remains boring. Enchment and restoration have the same basic spells, we share talents with the other specs, meaning that means they have no idea what to do.
Fulmination is just a passive thing thrown in, and our biggest damage depends on a random proc, so what's the point?

They should really rework the whole elemental spec,
Basing it entirely on lightning strikes as a concept the shaman is elemental, and the specifications are based on certain elements.

Currently on ptr the only possible build is surge of pawer and storm elemental, where when you activate Strm Elemental it spams LB and ES and then finished spams Lvb just after ES.

In my humble opinion it is not fun at all, but the other builds like fire elemental and ascendance are not fun either, especially because I become a kind of fire wizard ...

[Beingbob]

That talent should be reworked honestly, it's so incredibly boring and doesn't exactly make you feel like a "master of the elements".

Lol, it's one of the best talent Elemental shaman has ever had, and gives us some level of interaction between spells which has been the biggest complaint of the spec for the longest time. Antorus was such a blast to play thanks to that set bonus + Icefury build, you felt like a virtuoso of elemental magic weaving lava bursts between earth and frost shocks, and even earthquakes if you wore the Echoes of the Great Sundering leggo and played the Frostquake spec. I'm gonna go as far to claim it was the peak of elemental shaman gameplay in the history of the game - the skill cap was higher than that of even feral (and any other spec) at the time, but at the same time it was very viable (there was an elemental shaman in my raid team progging mythic Argus at the time, and he managed to be up there with high parsing Windwalkers much of the time) and highly engaging.

[Venziir]

Lol, it's one of the best talent Elemental shaman has ever had, and gives us some level of interaction between spells which has been the biggest complaint of the spec for the longest time. Antorus was such a blast to play thanks to that set bonus + Icefury build, you felt like a virtuoso of elemental magic weaving lava bursts between earth and frost shocks, and even earthquakes if you wore the Echoes of the Great Sundering leggo and played the Frostquake spec. I'm gonna go as far to claim it was the peak of elemental shaman gameplay in the history of the game - the skill cap was higher than that of even feral (and any other spec) at the time, but at the same time it was very viable (there was an elemental shaman in my raid team progging mythic Argus at the time, and he managed to be up there with high parsing Windwalkers much of the time) and highly engaging.

Aha, well sure that's all mighty fine... And utterly, utterly irellevant. It wasn't fun in BFA and we have no idea if it'll be fun in SL. FYI, I never said it was "BAD", I said it was boring.

[Kralljin]

Aha, well sure that's all mighty fine... And utterly, utterly irellevant. It wasn't fun in BFA and we have no idea if it'll be fun in SL. FYI, I never said it was "BAD", I said it was boring.

I mean, each to their own, but among the many rather "passive" talents in Elemental, you pick the one that actually adds a bit of interaction into your rotation?

Like, Earthen Rage or LMT are boring talents to me.

[Niwes]

i am totally on board with „choose, if you spend fulmination for AoE or ST“. this is mechanic and game play wise a good thing and i dont see any unresolvable probs with that.

rest is discussable.

[Venziir]

I mean, each to their own, but among the many rather "passive" talents in Elemental, you pick the one that actually adds a bit of interaction into your rotation?

Like, Earthen Rage or LMT are boring talents to me.

Oh sure, it's not thé most boring one... But it's not exactly hilarious either. I simply just responded to whoever brought up this particular talent. It's not exactly a secret, that the Elemental talent tree isn't exactly great.

[Niwes]

You seem to have listed most of the major faults with the spec in Shadowlands, similar to what Bloodmallet has been saying over at stormearthandlava.com. However, why state that Fulmination is a fine mechanic when you then go on to (rightly) show all the issues it presents? The reason why Earthquake can't be saved/prepared for an upcoming pack/AoE situation is because instead of having the old Maelstrom resource that worked fine, we now have this awkward split between Fulmination and Seismic Thunder. The reason Lava Burst and Icefury/Frost Shock feel bad and disentangled from the rest of the spec is because they don't generate Fulmination... if they did, then why even call it Fulmination and not let us keep Maelstrom, if it's just gonna work the same?

In addition, though you don't mention it, we also can't do our good old funnel into a single, priority target by getting lots of Earth Shocks through Chain Lightning, which has for a very long time been a nice little niche we've had.

Honestly, it kinda pisses me off that so many people seem excited for going back to Fulmination instead of having Maelstrom... it's just a cheap appeal to nostalgia that only has negative effects on our gameplay flow by removing interactions between our spells (which already in Legion and BfA was sometimes criticized for lacking baseline, non-talented interactions between our spells), and it doesn't really change anything rotationally - the end goal is still to dump our resource on Earth Shock (or Earth Quake in the case of Seismic Thunder). People seem to think it means we're moving away from a builder-spender style of gameplay that has sort of been a rallying cry when people have complained about homogenous-feeling classes in Legion/BfA, when in reality it doesn't matter whether we have 0-10 stacks of Fulmination/Seismic Thunder or 0-100 resource points of Maelstrom - it's the same resource with a different level of granularity.

Sorry for the rant, but initially I was quite excited for Shadowlands as an elemental shaman, but now it's starting to seem like a downgrade from BfA, which was already a major step down from Legion, imo.

thought mostly the same, especially the first part.

the problem with ele was not, how it played between spending the malstrom for aoe or st. it was the boring rest, that should be changed. and this has nothing to do with „if the resource is called malstrom or fulmination stack“. imo.

- - - Updated - - -

I just love how they've reverted the class resource mechanic to wod state and refuse to use the maelstrom bar, when it is visually the best solution rather than using buffs on a class that is known to have way too many buffs on the character, so you can be sure that people will use weakauras to turn this buff into a resource bar...

to me it looked like that this happened at Blizz HQ:

designer: „we decided that we wanna go back to a cd based system, cause it fits shaman class style“.
devs: „ok, we look into it, what we can do.“

instead of this, that NOT happened at Blizz HQ:

designer: „ we had a good idea for better Shaman design, but the end result showed us, that this works best, when the class is cd based“.
devs: „ok, this sounds good, cd based system fits mechanic nonetheless better. we will change it.“

in short: current direction is not based on a better or more natural system. it was a design decision and now they test, how they can achieve that. thats the reason why you reach points like „oh, now we just changed a resource bar into fulmination stacks“.

imo.

[Kralljin]

Oh sure, it's not thé most boring one... But it's not exactly hilarious either. I simply just responded to whoever brought up this particular talent. It's not exactly a secret, that the Elemental talent tree isn't exactly great.

That's not really it, the talent actually was one of the enabler for this entire funneling thing.
That alongside IF actually encouraged weaving different elemental school together.

To me, it's most certainly one of the better talents in the Elemental tree, because it enables synergies with different talents in a good way.

[rogas]

Tbh i liked the times when we were a buff class. We didn’t do much dps back then, and our rotation was thought of as being boring, but we brought something to the raid. What are we bringing nowadays?
I think i just wished our rotation had some extra. Make for example all shocks 30 sec debuffs. If you have all three on your prime target they melt into one new debuff wich makes lava blast be instant cast... just an idea. I’m sure other people can come up with much more exciting suggestions...

[Kalisandra]

That talent should be reworked honestly, it's so incredibly boring and doesn't exactly make you feel like a "master of the elements".

I quite liked the way it encouraged alternating Lava Bursts and other spells, and that it meant that you might want to sit on an Earth Shock for a shot while so you could get your LvB off first. However, on the PTR it has no interaction with Fulminate, and that makes do that sort of thing dumb, especially with Elemental Blast also eating Fulmination and it being on a fixed CD.

- - - Updated - - -

The reality is that the very specific elemental makes sense,

Let's talk about a specific that has nothing of elemental unless you take FrS, and still remains boring. Enchment and restoration have the same basic spells, we share talents with the other specs, meaning that means they have no idea what to do.
Fulmination is just a passive thing thrown in, and our biggest damage depends on a random proc, so what's the point?

They should really rework the whole elemental spec,
Basing it entirely on lightning strikes as a concept the shaman is elemental, and the specifications are based on certain elements.

Currently on ptr the only possible build is surge of pawer and storm elemental, where when you activate Strm Elemental it spams LB and ES and then finished spams Lvb just after ES.

In my humble opinion it is not fun at all, but the other builds like fire elemental and ascendance are not fun either, especially because I become a kind of fire wizard ...

I like Ascendance, but it's just right now, and besides Stormkeeper is so much more fun even in it's current weak form.

Another thing I dislike about the way things are built right now is that Resto has more powerful damage spells than Elemental, and Ele relies on Overload procs and Elemental Fury to get their DPS up (and thus on gear - until about 200 Crit and Mastery rating at L50 on the PTR, Ele's source of extra DPS is Fulminate procs). Heck, Resto has a higher proc rate from Lava Surge. Meanwhile for some reason the base heals from Chain Heal and HST are the same for both specs (but Ele's Healing Surge is much weaker, and that's the heal it's going to rely to survive). Then we have Echo of Elements not giving Ele a second charge of HST. Aside from the mastery, Ele feels like a cut-rate Resto with a few damage talents tacked on.

And Resto, well it's talents are basically unchanged, and that means Cloudburst Totem all day every day, and I've never liked the thing.

[soulearth86]

But how do you like to play with ascendance?
that is, shoot lava at proc and fire elemental I find it not very imaginative since the mage fire is already present

To know how many offensive soulbinds you can have active?

[Kalisandra]

But how do you like to play with ascendance?
that is, shoot lava at proc and fire elemental I find it not very imaginative since the mage fire is already present

I'm fine with Ascendance having a nice simple rotation that's completely different from the normal rotation. It not having much (or anything) to do with the elemental would be fine, too - linking stuff together too much is just a way of punishing people for not lining everything up perfectly and in these days of "everything on the GCD" makes things feel bad. However, having something like that old tier set bonus where each Lava Burst reduced the elemental's CD a bit would be fine, as Ascendance would then also have the effect of reducing the elemental's CD, but you wouldn't need to use both at once if you didn't want to.

[Northy]

I'm super annoyed by all the dead talents, and the extremely undertuned damage. If I want to play a hard caster that can actually nuke I'd just play Destro or MM Hunt.

[Shockzalot]

I'm presently at level 56 on my Shaman and Ele still has the limp dick feel to it and is very underwhelming. The Frost DK I've played pumps out a lot more damage, I wouldn't expect Ele to be very good in end game if it's garbage while leveling. The talents seem rather lack luster and fulmination doesn't seem like much of an upgrade over Maelstrom.

[Ele man]

Blizzard doesn't pay much attention to this spec. So playing this spec is wrong.
Looking at the patch contents, we can see that their spec understanding is seriously diminished.

This means they are saving money on the ele spec design, Everyone is watching what happens as a result.
I don't want to think negatively, but the reality is.
Blizzard eliminated most of its turning staff, resulting in wow having a bitter balance and a late patch cycle.
A spec with fewer people, such as an ele spec, is bound to suffer the damage completely.
Blizzard signals that this patch process is not intended to make the spec useful, and it should be taken seriously.

In addition, keep in mind that the ele spec in all the initial expansion pack seasons was completely worthless.
I can assure you that this will happen equally in SL.

[shammypie]

Blizzard doesn't pay much attention to this spec. So playing this spec is wrong.
Looking at the patch contents, we can see that their spec understanding is seriously diminished.

This means they are saving money on the ele spec design, Everyone is watching what happens as a result.
I don't want to think negatively, but the reality is.
Blizzard eliminated most of its turning staff, resulting in wow having a bitter balance and a late patch cycle.
A spec with fewer people, such as an ele spec, is bound to suffer the damage completely.
Blizzard signals that this patch process is not intended to make the spec useful, and it should be taken seriously.

In addition, keep in mind that the ele spec in all the initial expansion pack seasons was completely worthless.
I can assure you that this will happen equally in SL.

new year, same game; resto is for raiding but you can dps at the end

[Venziir]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand it's back to Maelstrom hah....

[msdos]

When your spec obviously needs new abilities but the devs refuse to commit lmao.. What a load of shite.

[Release]

I played an elemental shaman until WoD where I shifted to rogue and I was considering going back to Ele for shadowlands to mix things up. From reading these forums that presently does not seem like a good idea.

[soulearth86]

there are two months left to the expansion, now we shaman elemental, we are back as in the live version and if in 5 months they have only managed to make mistakes with the elemental, let alone what they can do in just 2 months ...the worst thing is that on the forums this thing is hailed as a triumph, we managed to remove the fulmination, and good assholes, now get the elemental shaman identical to the BFA version