Elemental 8.1 PTR Changes

[cocoqt]

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.

[BlueRemedy]

Sounds fairly shit. These sound largely more like hotfix changes rather than what you'd need a patch for.

No Flame Shock change, no summon rebalancing, little done to make the supposed turret into a legitimate playstyle, Earth Shock seemingly nerfed.

[Jacob6875]

Not a fan of what is being announced so far.

Nerfing Earthshock in order to buff Lightning Bolt ? This is going to reduce the damage of our hardest hitting spell not to mention have unintended changes like making talents like Aftershock much weaker just for the sake of "balancing out our damage"

Also it is a bit bizarre that after announcing they are going to buff LB they are removing the talents High Voltage and Exposed Elements that primarily increase the damage of Lightning Bolt. Do you want it to be a higher portion of our damage or not ?

Stormkeeper will still not be as good as Ascendance. 2 higher damage LBs every min is also just plain boring for a talent.

Hopefully whatever the new talents are they are good but I am pretty underwhelmed right now and don't really see this improving the class much at all.

[BiggestNoob]

Seems rather minor with no rotational improvements aside from allowing you to open with Lava Burst which doesn't change much aside from wasting a proc from the first few ticks of FS. There are also no 8.1 changes to resto or enhance yet.

Looks like Shaman is going to remain the worst class in the expansion for the entire expansion. Pepehands

[Deleted]

Well... i wasn't a naysayer, but it doesn't sound very good. But i kind of expected that.

If they want ele to be the lightning caster, they should remove the fire themes from flame shock and lavaburst and replace them with thundery spells.
Buffing LB does nothing. It's actually bad for pvp aswell... like anyone is gonna let you cast lightning bolts.

But, i'm curious about the talent changes.

[RuneDK]

Sounds fairly shit. These sound largely more like hotfix changes rather than what you'd need a patch for.

No Flame Shock change, no summon rebalancing, little done to make the supposed turret into a legitimate playstyle, Earth Shock seemingly nerfed.

This is exactly what I was worried about...I main enhance over elemental but ill play either...i just want one of them to not suck...and these sound like mediocre fixes. Makes me more nervous for the enhance changes.

[Ragnarocket]

Well... i wasn't a naysayer, but it doesn't sound very good. But i kind of expected that.

If they want ele to be the lightning caster, they should remove the fire themes from flame shock and lavaburst and replace them with thundery spells.
Buffing LB does nothing. It's actually bad for pvp aswell... like anyone is gonna let you cast lightning bolts.

But, i'm curious about the talent changes.

Even if the talents are good they've just created another Echo situation...where everyone picks those talents. And now we have to choose between Earthen Rage, Echo, and Elemental Blast. I'm still picking Echo Blizz. I just will every time. It needs to be baseline or something at this point.

[RuneDK]

Not a fan of what is being announced so far.

Nerfing Earthshock in order to buff Lightning Bolt ? This is going to reduce the damage of our hardest hitting spell not to mention have unintended changes like making talents like Aftershock much weaker just for the sake of "balancing out our damage"

Also it is a bit bizarre that after announcing they are going to buff LB they are removing the talents High Voltage and Exposed Elements that primarily increase the damage of Lightning Bolt. Do you want it to be a higher portion of our damage or not ?

Stormkeeper will still not be as good as Ascendance. 2 higher damage LBs every min is also just plain boring for a talent.

Hopefully whatever the new talents are they are good but I am pretty underwhelmed right now and don't really see this improving the class much at all.

Unless there's some synergy between spells and having LB...they are just shifting damage around....the spec already sucks so moving around where damage is coming from is just stupid...I dont get what's wrong with keeping ES where it is(it probably needs a buff too, but whatever) and buffing LB regardless....these changes, and we dont know about the new talents yet, sound stupid lazy.

[Laqweeta]

Disagree with unsubs. It's the only way they seem to listen, as proven thus far.

[RuneDK]

Disagree with unsubs. It's the only way they seem to listen, as proven thus far.

that and class participation in endgame....when warlocks had the lowest representation in the game they actually fixed them...I'm done on my shaman and as a whole come October when other games start coming out I may be done with wow for a while too.

[Amba]

I really can not believe that they have thought about the changes.

Let's start from the ground that Blizzard began to think that we are the class and the specification (enhancer, eleme, rest) that appears less in miticas + and raid. I mean, if they want to see more people in these events they need big changes, a friend will not appear and a shaman will be created, my friend will want to play with a character that hurts and is useful.

[zito]

These changes seem fairly pointless. All this is doing is redirecting where for damage is coming from. Something that could have been a hot fix instead of fixing rotational flow

Blizzard can never admit their mistakes

[Jotaux]

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.

I'm pretty sure this was the case at the end of ICC, can anyone confirm?

[RuneDK]

Yep, I got my shaman to 120. I will not play it again until something changes. Sucks because I loved legion Ele, at least at the end.

I leveled my DK right after i finished my shaman so I at least have something else to play. He's only 10 ilvls lower than my shaman too so making the change(aside from rep grinds) shouldn't be too bad.

[Tikishock]

Not a fan of what is being announced so far.

Nerfing Earthshock in order to buff Lightning Bolt ? This is going to reduce the damage of our hardest hitting spell not to mention have unintended changes like making talents like Aftershock much weaker just for the sake of "balancing out our damage"

Also it is a bit bizarre that after announcing they are going to buff LB they are removing the talents High Voltage and Exposed Elements that primarily increase the damage of Lightning Bolt. Do you want it to be a /higher portion of our damage or not ?

Stormkeeper will still not be as good as Ascendance. 2 higher damage LBs every min is also just plain boring for a talent.

Hopefully whatever the new talents are they are good but I am pretty underwhelmed right now and don't really see this improving the class much at all.

I'm glad they are balancing out the damage. We cast a lot of LB in order to generate Earthshock--this should balance our dps a lot more on shorter fights.

They are replacing those talents with other things. Don't assume those talents wont buff lightning bolt--especially ones called Call the Thunder and Surge of Power. You're just complaining to complain at this point with no information.

Stormkeeper will be WAY better than Ascendance on a lot of high movement fights as well as PvP and mythic+. It buffs Stormkeeper's damage to bosses in M+ and in raids. I mean...come on...did you even think before posting?

I know most people won't be happy with anything unless Echo is baseline, FS is off cooldown, Gust of Wind is added, Astral Call is on a 30 second cooldown, Ascendance is baseline, all damage increased by 100% and the talents that replace everything that went baseline or best in row. Ele were NOT getting a rework, period. Blizzard never stated this. It was simply fan generated wishful thinking. I think the changes are beneficial to the spec. Is it perfect? No, nothing will be but it's at least a positive step in the right direction.

- - - Updated - - -

These changes seem fairly pointless. All this is doing is redirecting where for damage is coming from. Something that could have been a hot fix instead of fixing rotational flow

Blizzard can never admit their mistakes

If you honestly think these changes are pointless then you just aren't paying attention. These are buffs and without knowing what the talents or what the tuning will actually be you really have nothing to base your opinion off of other than continual contempt for anything Blizzard does.

[ttylol]

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.

Surge is interesting at first glance, throwing a bone to Flame Shock lol. But Lightning vs Lava won't be a choice after min/max math? Hmm :V

[Thelxi]

Flame shock cooldown removed or bust.

[blehmeh]

Shaman are doomed to eternal bandaid fixes.

I'm not really that impressed. These "improvements" seem minor and awkward. I'm still going to be a sitting duck in movement based raid mechanics.

Also, ffs why do we need both spell damage and physical damage in both ele and enh? It means we need both a DH and Monk for their debuff for the boost in damage.

I know most people won't be happy with anything unless Echo is baseline, FS is off cooldown, Gust of Wind is added, Astral Call is on a 30 second cooldown, Ascendance is baseline, all damage increased by 100% and the talents that replace everything that went baseline or best in row. Ele were NOT getting a rework, period. Blizzard never stated this. It was simply fan generated wishful thinking. I think the changes are beneficial to the spec. Is it perfect? No, nothing will be but it's at least a positive step in the right direction.

Come on, this is an exaggeration and you know it. Play another class for like 5 minutes. You go ahead and enjoy your bandaid hotfix "positive step in the right direction", I'll go play several complete classes that don't need a rework. Is it better? Yeah, but after over a decade of failing to establish a real reliable set of mechanics for ele, I'm just tired of it. You think this will bring back all the top ele's who have walked away from the class? Very unlikely.

Enhance is also a mess as well, it basically comes down to stack haste and RNG Stormstrike spam. It's so boring and flimsy. It also needs a rework.

[Jagd]

I wish now they would take a step back and redo everything. Make Ele the lightning caster. Get rid of flameshock, earthquake and redesign the entire class around lightning.

First thing I thought too lol.

[Spiel]

Surge is interesting at first glance, throwing a bone to Flame Shock lol. But Lightning vs Lava won't be a choice after min/max math? Hmm :V

unless you overload nonstop, you wount be generating maelstrom fast enough to be worth it, lava looks like the way to go