Lava Burst Blue Post

[Northy]

New Talent:

Burning Earth: Every 7th (?) Lava Burst hit causes your next Fulmination discharge to gain a 100% critical strike chance.

[Amaravati]

I've always been interested in adding another spell to Elementals toolkit of the Frost school, maybe something like

Avalanche
2s cast | 15s cooldown
Deals large amount of Frost damage to your target and increases the damage of the next Fire spell on the target by 20%.*

Feedback
Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning casts reduce the remaining cooldown of Avalanche by 1 second.

*The purpose in increasing Fire damage is to cement its position as above Lava Burst in priority

Also, allowing Searing Totem to scale with Haste, buffing Unleashed Flame, buffing Lightning Bolt, and making Unleashed Lightning baseline would all be good places to slightly increase our damage.

[Krekko]

Yeah, truthfully, the elemental toolkit being so... narrow and mechanically has always beckoned questions.

Shocks should be more situational, with a secondary spell (like Lava Burst) to complement them.

Also, doing it (for boss fights) utilizing Say fire or frost for different parts of the fights (one first, then the other) or something of the sort would add just something to it.

[Deleted]

Yeah, truthfully, the elemental toolkit being so... narrow and mechanically has always beckoned questions.

Shocks should be more situational, with a secondary spell (like Lava Burst) to complement them.

Also, doing it (for boss fights) utilizing Say fire or frost for different parts of the fights (one first, then the other) or something of the sort would add just something to it.

You mean like balance's eclipse system?

I'd like that.

[Kralljin]

New Talent:

Burning Earth: Every 7th (?) Lava Burst hit causes your next Fulmination discharge to gain a 100% critical strike chance.

Let's make Crit even more useless!

[korlach]

I really don't think adding a spell is the answer. Buffing a class and changing a class are 2 different things. I do wish Elemental Blast was baseline because PE looks like a lot of fun to use but without EB the rotation gets a little too simple, especially if they listened to a lot of you guys asking for shocks to be on separate cds. What I would like to see is something that plays off what we already do, such as a burning effect from lava burst that dots the target for say 20% of the damage of LvB. A change like that would be very easy for blizzard to tweak if it becomes OP as they can always change the %. I know that sounds more like a mage effect or previous Tier bonus, so they could change it around to be off LB or even ES.

[Samiizz]

One more spell is always good since our action bar is usually empty!

and a burning effect will have to stack since during accendance it is worthless if it is applied off lava burst and lightning bolt is the spam spell.

An execute ability makes since.. make lightning bolt doing more damage enough to make it above LvB in priority, maybe.
Buffing a single spell on CD to be the execute ability would mean that it would have to do loads more damage to bring shamans dps up.

If LvB is buffed with an execute mechanic then people would always hold off Ascendance when the boss is around ~50% to ~40% so they can spam LvB which would be very situational since any random death of the dps would result in net loss of dps.

Warlocks just spam one skill during burn phases and they shoot past shamans during execute phases even though their damage is already very high before hand!

After playing this class since Vanilla, I was forced to change specs a lot due to nerfs that started with Enhancement.

Atleast we always have resto to fall back on :P

[Deleted]

I'd love some kind of execute ability..

Crackling Fire: Your Lava Burst now causes you to gain 7 stacks of Lightning Shield when hitting a target below 20%.Wont make us delay Ascendance just to use it in burn phase, but still gives is some extra dps during execute-phase.

[Samiizz]

I'd love some kind of execute ability..

Crackling Fire: Your Lava Burst now causes you to gain 7 stacks of Lightning Shield when hitting a target below 20%.Wont make us delay Ascendance just to use it in burn phase, but still gives is some extra dps during execute-phase.

what would you do if Ascendance came off CD while boss is at 20% or below?
LvB>ES>LvB>ES?

Doesnt make since since LvB spam would most likely out dps fulmination due to the guaranteed crit.

I would much rather see something like the locks version of execute.

make life simple.

Edit:

Maybe even just a passive but to make us keep up with other classes.. something like
All spells do 10% more damage while boss =< 20%

However, I dont think the issue is the lack of an execute ability.
Ele Shaman sustained damage is very low.. no way around it other than a flat increase to overall damage.

I dont think the a LB/CL only buff is the best option.

I think the best place to start is remove the LB glyph and make it baseline for elemental. Then move from there!

[Deleted]

what would you do if Ascendance came off CD while boss is at 20% or below?
LvB>ES>LvB>ES?

I'd stick to our normal priority ofc... Lava Burst all day long. Yes, does mean that a lot of lightning shield stacks would be wasted, but I can only really think of one boss where the sub 20% is short enough for the change to not affect us at all (Elegon).

A passive that just increases our damage on low hp targets just feels so dull.. I'd rather have something which fiddles with our rotation, either a Shadowburn-kinda spell or something that changes our spell priority.

[Deleted]

All spells do 10% more damage while boss =< 20%

That'd be too easy, they wouldn't want to just give some classes a straight damage increase in execute range.

[Ardourdan]

Our damage problem was solved in Firelands with the reset of Fire Elemental totem on the T12 bonus. Why that was never implemented in place of Thunderstorm is a complete mystery to me.

[Kralljin]

Our damage problem was solved in Firelands with the reset of Fire Elemental totem on the T12 bonus. Why that was never implemented in place of Thunderstorm is a complete mystery to me.

FE was a fix for dps, but a really bad one.

On any Encounter with more than a single mob to hit, this thing was a giant Pain back then, though the AI is better now i don't want that my Dps relies on a Guardian.

[tusker]

A lot of great ideas here. In general I think elemental needs either an overhaul or something close to it. Leave the core stuff about the same but add some variety and complexity in there (along the lines of some of the ideas in this thread). We've been slogging through the same old for a while now. Why is it not obvious to Blizzard that elemental lacks any kind of real substance?

If you compare us to Boomkins, for example, there's just a lot more to that spec -- more mechanics, more buttons to push, etc. Now I'm not saying we should be like Boomkins... I'm just using it as an example. There's a lot of great stuff about elemental but you'd think they'd put some effort and thought into adding some more interesting mechanics or things to our rotation.... I'm not talking adding one little thing like fulmination. They are making baby steps which is good, but next expansion I hope elemental gets some significant changes.

[Courierrawr]

A lot of great ideas here. In general I think elemental needs either an overhaul or something close to it. Leave the core stuff about the same but add some variety and complexity in there (along the lines of some of the ideas in this thread). We've been slogging through the same old for a while now. Why is it not obvious to Blizzard that elemental lacks any kind of real substance?

If you compare us to Boomkins, for example, there's just a lot more to that spec -- more mechanics, more buttons to push, etc. Now I'm not saying we should be like Boomkins... I'm just using it as an example. There's a lot of great stuff about elemental but you'd think they'd put some effort and thought into adding some more interesting mechanics or things to our rotation.... I'm not talking adding one little thing like fulmination. They are making baby steps which is good, but next expansion I hope elemental gets some significant changes.

More buttons and mechanics for boomkins? Not really.. Boomkin is probably the most boring DPS spec in the game atm, you apply your dots and then spam wrath/starfire times infinity, sometimes you're lucky and get a starsurge proc but that's it.

At least ele has the excitement of getting a couple lava burst procs in a row.

[Kralljin]

At least ele has the excitement of getting a couple lava burst procs in a row.

What's the serious difference between Starsurge Procs and Lava Burst Procs?

[Eliot123]

Unlinking shock cds would go a long way, imo, especially in PvP. Shocks on their own don't even do that much damage (...excluding Earth with full fulmination but that's another thing...), it's mostly that choosing between e.g. slowing down and fire shock for LB crit that sucks, especially now when everyone has 50 different ways to catch up with their target.

As for execute... Maybe something with Unleash Elements? Similar to Shadow Word: Death, it could do >insert number here< times more damage when the target is under 25% health. Just an idea. >_>

I would love it if we got some kind of wind spell, though. Wind Lash (as someone already mentioned) or Wind Whip or Windwrath... Elemental shamans need a bit more ''elemental'' to them I'd say. :P

[Deleted]

What's the serious difference between Starsurge Procs and Lava Burst Procs?

Bigger numbers for Balance Druid. (As far as I know, Starsurge non-crit is stronger then Lava Burst)

[PaintOnASign]

As for execute... Maybe something with Unleash Elements? Similar to Shadow Word: Death, it could do >insert number here< times more damage when the target is under 25% health. Just an idea. >_>

Considering we already skip Unleash Elements unless you don't have UL glyph and you're on the move, the buff to UE would have be very substantial to warrant using a global on UE's crappy damage. I agree though, I would love to see Shaman's get some sort of execute.

[SamoTray]

Bigger numbers for Balance Druid. (As far as I know, Starsurge non-crit is stronger then Lava Burst)

it is true that Starsurge hits for so much more than Lvb but Lvb always crits and we spend maybe 2-3 times as many GCD's casting it compared to starsurge justifiying the dmg. So you really cannot compare the two comparing Ele blast and starsurge would actually make more sense.