Oh, boi. Where do we start? There is so much to say and so little time to write.
It has been three months since the last rework, and Elemental Shamans already got another one. Or is it the rest of the first one? Nonetheless, with 11.0.5 Elemental Shaman will change. Significantly so. 11.0.0 started addressing some of the major quarrels of the player base with the spec, and they are really trying to tackle the rest of them this time, elevating our gameplay and bringing Elemental Shamans up to the standards of modern World of Warcraft.
In this article, we will examine the spec's historical context, pain points, and current position. Then, we will have some fun trying to predict the impact of the changes currently on PTR and how those will affect the spec's balance and feel.
The Story So Far
In days of old Elemental Shamans were wielding the 4 Elements in Harmony. Lightning spells were used as generators. Fire spells were used as mini-cooldowns, offering moments of power, and were, in general, high-damage spells that were woven into the rotation. Nature spells were our hard-hitting spenders and the payoff for using your generators well (Yes, Lightning spells are also Nature spells ... shush). Lastly, our Frost spells
Icefury and
Frost Shock broke up the rotation even more, offering some additional movement as well as further opportunities for weaving between spell schools.
All of this changed when Dragonflight started. The many talent nodes synergizing and often offering similar benefits to a specific part of the spec made builds very lopsided. Most builds revolved either only around
Lava Burst and trying to increase access to this spell as much as possible, or they completely ignored
Lava Burst, instead focussing all of their efforts on buffing
Lightning Bolt. Both types of gameplay felt alien to veterans of the spec in some way. Ignoring your "high-damage"
Lava Burst went against the philosophy of the spell and the spec itself, but the same also applies to making it available all the time and ignoring everything else. It felt unintuitive and, more importantly, plain dull.
Granted, this issue isn't purely caused by the talent trees. The tier sets in Dragonflight significantly amplified these issues. All tier sets after Season 1 played exactly into the respective feedback loops or synergies of either of the two "builds," which made the other type of build fall behind significantly. When they tried to design a tier set in Season 3 that would be able to work with both trees and still be interesting, it ended up significantly underpowered because there was little to no overlap between the respective builds that such a tier set could have targeted.
What's the status Quo? Didn't we just have a rework?
With 11.0, the introductory patch of "The War Within", Elemental Shamans got their first big chunk of developer attention. Big changes to the spec tree and some smaller ones to the class tree changed most of what we knew about Elemental Shaman from the previous expansion. Playing Elemental Shaman on Beta was a bit of a rollercoaster, given the size and type of the rework. It also introduced a lot of new bugs, most of which were slowly fixed before the expansion was released. While we can only guess the actual developers' intention with these changes, here is a non-exhaustive list of what I think the goals (or at least the benefits) were.
- Addressing balancing issues with our Mastery Mastery: Elemental Overload
- Improving Defensive Capabilities
- Removing access to Lava Burst
- Increasing relative damage of our spenders
- Change the consistency of Icefury potentially to prohibit builds from being as consistent?
- Putting some power into Elementals
Most of these goals were achieved, apart maybe from the last point. Some of those changes introduced new problems, e.g., the changes to our Mastery significantly nerfed overloads, as well as pets, which made
Stormkeeper a lot worse than it was previously and added some scaling issues for the stat in Farseer builds. During most stages of the Beta the spec played very well, even though there was a sneaking suspicion that some part of the changes might still be missing. Maybe
Lava Burst was still a bit too accessible. Maybe
Ascendance still overshadowed the rotation a bit. But, compared to the previous expansion, the spec played really smoothly. Sadly, the last set of balancing changes that hit the spec right before release broke something about its internal balance. Changing the spell school of
Primordial Wave and decreasing the damage of
Lava Burst made it so casting
Lava Burst wasn't worth the time spent on it ... again ... and we went back to ignoring half of our kit ... again. This time, the gauge pointed towards
Lightning Bolt.
The criminal this time was one singular talent: Flash of Lightning not only offers exceptional defensive and offensive benefits, but the cooldown reduction this talent generates is so oppressively massive that it warps the entire talent tree. Essentially halving the cooldown of every affected spell, including
Primordial Wave, by spamming
Lightning Bolt at a rate of
once per second, significantly increased the strength of the Farseer Hero Talent Tree, considerably increasing the number of Ancestors spawned. It also doubled the uptime of
Storm Elemental, which reduces the cast time of
Lightning Bolt, allowing you to utilize the flat damage per cast from the Ancestors a lot better than any builds that required you to cast
Lava Burst, because even an instant cast has double the cast time of a fully buffed
Lightning Bolt. In a build like this, pets account for roughly a third of our damage.
The resulting gameplay and "damage profile" is probably the worst iteration of Elemental Shaman I have ever played, at least in Single Target, and combines the three things I dislike whenever they become a significant part of the spec: Ignoring
Lava Burst, spamming low cast time non-instant spells, and relying on pets to do most of your damage.
It has to be noted that Blizzard has been actively working on the spec while the first patch is live. These changes include the inclusion of pet damage into our Mastery, which makes it a more desirable stat, even though it's still pretty bad. They also addressed some of the QoL issues with the Stormbringer tree, but more on that later. Still, none of this addresses the new, underlying issues leading to the current problems.
So, what is the solution now?
What comes next?
Well, with a new patch comes a new rework — again. Or maybe it's the second part of the previous rework. Who knows?
First things first. Flash of Lightning has been removed. This is good! It also hurts — a lot. Previously, Flash of Lightning reduced the cooldown of every spell it affected to roughly half. This meant that our interrupt
Wind Shear had an average cooldown of 6 seconds, all defensives were available about twice as often as the tooltip would indicate, and every utility spell, like
Capacitor Totem or
Cleanse Spirit, was available whenever necessary, too. Let me repeat this: Removing this talent was
definitely necessary for gameplay and balance reasons. Still, losing this much defensive power and utility without compensation or other changes is very scary.
Still, this promotes a much healthier rotation with
Lava Burst coming back as a high-damage mini-CD and
Lightning Bolt being an actual filler again, and neither of them being the sole thing the entire gameplay revolves around, so in my personal opinion, this is a massive win. I do still hope for a buff to our survivability. Maybe make
Stone Bulwark Totem a 2-minute CD again so it can be reset with Totemic Recall?
Anyway, back to the topic on hand.
Ascendance has been reworked. Both graphically and mechanically.
Ascendance received two new modules, one with hairs and one without (pictures later in this article 😊 ), and you can choose which of the two new ones and the old one you prefer, with glyphs allowing you to choose any of them. Mechanically, the spell is also very different. When you press the button, you spread 6
Flame Shocks and immediately throw a
Lava Burst at each of them. You also get an additional overload to every ability that can overload, including the
Lava Bursts pressing the button generates, as well as spenders with
Mountains Will Fall. Additionally, every overload during
Ascendance, including the additional ones it generates, deals 150% more damage. And as if all of this wasn't enough,
Preeminence adds 25% Haste while
Ascendance is running. So, as you can probably gather, considering the number of stacking effects, this is pretty strong, especially for AoE. It is so strong that you won't be able to use it at the start of most mythic+ pulls because you will honestly just pull threat and die to aggro, even with good tanks.
On the lightning side of the equation, a lot is happening, too. We get two new talents
Charged Conduit and
Herald of the Storms, as well as some changes to
Storm Elemental.
Charged Conduit reads pretty boring but is a very noticeable buff to our AoE, which is only exacerbated by
Herald of the Storms, which sort of counteracts the
Stormkeeper nerf caused by the Mastery changes in 11.0 or replacing the CDR that Flash of Lightning offered.
Storm Elemental suffers from the loss of
Skybreaker's Fiery Demise but is pretty happy about the change to the functionality of its
Wind Gust buff. Previously, this stacked up to 10 stacks, offering a 3% cast speed increase to
Lightning Bolt and
Chain Lightning per stack each time you cast either of those spells. After the patch, it only stacks to 4 but offers 4% Haste per application. This is a pretty neat change. Not only does this work better with
Ascendance. It also removes the possibility of getting into a situation where you entirely ignore
Lava Burst while
Storm Elemental is up. Lastly, the Stormbringer tree was slightly reshuffled.
Arc Discharge is now alone in the middle of the tree and offers its benefits, two instant casts with 40% more damage, to both
Lightning Bolt and
Chain Lightning and procs regardless of the number of targets hit by the
Tempest that procced it. This is a significant improvement to the spell in Mythic+ especially, and just a "nice to have" that makes the talent feel a lot more natural.
Storm Swell was moved from the middle node to the left and now just plain up gives Mastery on
Tempest cast. It is hard to say how this works out in comparison to
Supercharge, but it makes a lot more sense to have it be a more consistent competition to
Supercharge and not have this Single Target vs AoE friction in the middle of a hero tree. Lastly,
Nature's Protection has been changed from a 3% DR debuff on hit by
Tempest to a flat 3% DR whenever
Lightning Shield is active, ... which is always (assuming you don't forget). Having a short-duration DR on an offensive spell was a weird decision from the start, so this is much appreciated. The least impactful change, which is still a great QoL change, is the removal of Shocking Grasp (chance to slow on Nature damage) in favor of two new talents,
Electroshock and
Lightning Conduit, both increasing our move speed, one of them more consistently than the other.
The fire side of things received just four notable changes:
- Icefury now procs on all spells and not just on Lava Burst
- Primordial Wave now procs a Lava Surge
- Deeply Rooted Elements now procs on spenders
- The new talent "Erupting Lava" now converts Flame Shock into direct damage
The first two are nice little QoL changes. Allowing
Icefury to proc from most spells doesn't make it broken or significantly change its role, but it will enable it to slot into builds more consistently. Anything that mentions
Deeply Rooted Elements that isn't the removal of the talent will always be very divisive in the community. Still, this is a good change. Allowing spenders to proc
Deeply Rooted Elements makes it matter in AoE, making the impact of the talent a lot smoother and removing the weird need to spam a single target spell like
Lava Burst in AoE. The problem here is that, for some reason, Blizzard hasn't yet touched the proc rate, which is especially problematic considering that we have multiple spenders, each costing a different amount of Maelstrom. The feel of this is heavily affected by a bug on the PTR that allows the
Elemental Blast generated by
Fusion of Elements to proc
Deeply Rooted Elements, but this is beside the point.
Erupting Lava is a lot more problematic. I like the idea of the talent.
Flame Shock is a boring DoT that you must keep active in Single Target to guarantee your
Lava Burst crits. With
Primordial Wave being on a 30-second cooldown and
Flame Shock duration being 18 seconds, normal
Flame Shock casts are in a very weird position where a lot of their duration is always wasted.
Erupting Lava "fixes" this by giving random uptime reduction, allowing more
Flame Shocks to fit between
Primordial Waves and offering some wiggling room. The talent further adds some duration and damage to
Flame Shock, which is certainly very welcome. On paper, this works pretty well. Every 30 seconds, you cast a
Primordial Wave and a
Flame Shock for a total duration of 2*(18+6)=48 seconds and cast roughly 4
Lava Bursts plus overloads, eating roughly 15-18 seconds of the DoT.
The problems start to show if you consider
Ascendance. An average opener now starts with
Primordial Wave, applying 24 seconds of
Flame Shock, and then goes straight into
Ascendance, which reapplies
Flame Shock (to the max duration of 32s) and an instant cast
Lava Burst right after. This results in 3
Lava Burst, 3 Overloads, and however many overloads the actual mastery proc chance contributes (let's assume 1 for this example). 3
Lava Bursts and four overloads amount in 3*6+4*3=30 seconds of reduction, instantly eating the entire DoT and requiring another
Flame Shock cast. I think the talent is a neat experiment. Still, similar talents like
Internal Combustion have not been received well, and our version of the talent is even more punishing than this. I am not wholly convinced how fun the rotational impact of this is, but in my opinion, it solves a problem that the spec would be running into otherwise. We will see.
Let's move on to the QoL changes, some of which have significant gameplay implications.
A change already on the live servers is that
Tempest now stacks to two, and
Stormkeeper stacks to three. This solves some problems when different application modes of the respective talents overlap and removes the need for an extensive suite of Weakauras whenever you feel like playing Stormbringer Elemental. Nice!
A change that isn't on live servers is that
Tempest can now Overload via
Power of the Maelstrom and
Surge of Power. This is massive. Increasing the damage of most, if not all
Tempests to at least double makes the spell a force to be reckoned with in both Single Target and AoE. This change makes
Lightning Bolt and
Tempest behave much more consistently, but it will require you to pay attention to when you are generating
Tempest procs, increasing the skill expression of the spec significantly. This plays surprisingly well. Noticeably,
Tempest still doesn't work with
Stormkeeper, which is undoubtedly for the better. Even with just this change
Tempest, it is a significant part of the damage breakdown. With the reduced cooldown of
Stormkeeper via
Herald of the Storms, this would have very quickly started overshadowing the rotation again.
While most of the changes were good, some of the remaining talents seem like they could use some extra love still. Previously, the use cases of the Elementals were very clearly separated.
Storm Elemental was the choice for Lightning builds, and
Fire Elemental was the choice for Fire builds. Seemed reasonable. After the changes to the spec that make the spec itself use all elements a lot more equally and, more importantly,
Storm Elemental now giving flat Haste to all spells instead of just the Lightning ones,
Storm Elemental now seems like the clear choice in any and all use cases. Similarly, the Farseer Hero Talent tree is in an existential crisis. Lacking behind in Single Target and AoE in all testing, its only selling point is its simplicity, which doesn't count for too much if poorly executing on Stormbringer still beats it. With the patch coming in in less than two weeks, it doesn't seem particularly likely that either of these balancing concerns will be addressed before release, but I hope Blizzard will surprise us or at least keep an eye on the issues.
As a last aside, let's still talk about the visual upgrades. I already mentioned the new
Ascendance models. We get two new glyphs
Glyph of Traditional Ascendance and
Glyph of Energetic Ascendance, which, with the new default model, result in 3 ways you can customize your
Ascendance model. Furthermore,
Lava Burst got a new animation. Where previously it was lovingly called the "meatball" (and let's be honest, it will still be called that), it now feels like an actual Fire
Blast and looks really cool. Even more so if you throw out 30+ of them simultaneously with
Ascendance and
Primordial Wave.
Is it good?
Yes.This article is already long enough and in no way exhaustive. I could probably keep going for at least this long again and go into the details and rotational impact of every small change, but many things just aren't fully researched yet. The new increased release cadence and the unprecedented amount of dev attention (if the dev is reading this: thanks btw, please don't stop), are challenging to keep up with so really just consider this a "First Impression", because more things are still to be discovered. It can't be overstated how clear it is to me that Blizzard is actively listening to the community and that a lot of the changes came directly from community feedback. However, developer intention is still clearly visible in all of the changes, and there is a vision for the entire spec visible in the rework. Even if not every change immediately works out completely or some things require additional changes, I consider this rework a big success.
So once again, for everyone who hates reading:
All the Elements are back on the table. New
Ascendance is strong, engaging, and works well. The new talents feel like they supplement the base spec and don't wholly override it, and there are now some hard choices to be made between nodes instead of "Build A vs. Build B." The spec and its talents feel much more continuous between Single Target and AoE. There are clear "Moments of Power," and the damage feels like it is a lot more in the hands of the player than previously. It also does not rely on weird gimmicks and timers that would require external tools. The rework is a broad success; let's hope it doesn't break during tuning.
If I were to abuse this last section as a tiny little wishlist: