The Elemental Shaman tier set puts a lot of emphasis on our baseline cooldown
Fire Elemental. By reducing the cooldown and increasing the duration of the elemental, this synergizes very well with
Seeds of Rampant Growth (the Night Fae legendary) and could potentially allow for 100% uptime on
Fire Elemental. This shouldn’t be particularly impactful to the rotation aside from the additional
Lava Surge procs. However, it is likely we’ll start using
Lava Burst during
Storm Elemental now as well. This also may open the door to legendaries and talents we haven’t used much in the recent past, such as
Ascendance and
Deeply Rooted Elements (no promises).
While we don’t have exact numbers to share, this tier set does seem to be quite powerful on single target. If I had to estimate, I’d place it between a 10% and 20% DPS increase. This becomes a little more complicated (and awkward) on AoE, as we typically play
Storm Elemental for AoE and casting
Lava Burst during that may not be worth it. Granted, it would only take 3-4
Lava Bursts to get a second
Tempest use which will likely be quite good if the AoE lasts long enough.
There are a few noteworthy issues with this set bonus as it stands. For example,
Storm Elemental emphasizes
Lightning Bolt and
Chain Lightning; casting
Lava Burst, especially on AoE, is going to feel weird and may not even be worth it. Personally, I’d like to see the bonus change when talented into
Storm Elemental to be tied to Lightning abilities or maelstrom spenders. Another major issue with this set is that we can only have 1 elemental out at a time while using
Primal Elementalist. This generally wouldn’t be an issue, but
Earth Elemental provides non-trivial defensives between
Harden Skin and
Vital Accretion. In order to use these, you’d have to dismiss your
Fire Elemental or
Storm Elemental. This has the potential to cause a very large damage loss. Additionally, as a spec, Elemental is already very consistent and generally lacks burst damage. I would personally like to see this set bonus changed to enhance
Fire Elemental/
Storm Elemental rather than extend it if it’s going to be focused around that cooldown. This would allow Elemental to have a more noteworthy burst window while also reducing the impact of the
Earth Elemental issue.
On the surface,
Heal the Soul (2-Set) is quite simple: casting
Chain Heal on a person with
Riptide will buff the whole spell by ~30% from the increased crit chance. That does mean that you'll want to
always cast
Chain Heal on a
Riptide person as now if you're not doing that, you're losing potential throughput, which restricts your target options by a lot. This set bonus should bring
Chain Heal back to the forefront as its currently one of the lesser used spells, and along with it (potentially) the talent
High Tide.
There's quite a few synergies as its basically anything that
Chain Heal already interacts with. Examples:
Overall this set seems fine, while its just a straight buff to a spell it nonetheless makes you change around your gameplay a little by encouraging
Chain Heal usage. The dependency on only being able to cast it on specific targets is not great, but easy to deal with and might make you strategically place
Riptide in a way that you have access to your
Chain Heal for multiple groupings of people.
Not a massive throughput gain unless synergies, the
Chain Heal button and external mana are abused, but also not on the weak side. That said since you have to cast
Chain Heal the set is prone to be weaker for very spread encounters.
Heal the Soul (4-Set) has an inherent synergy with the 2-Set which means they have to be looked at in combination. Every cast of
Chain Heal reduces the cooldown of
Spirit Link Totem by 0 to 8 seconds, depending on how many hits are critical strikes. Simply reducing a mitigation CDs cooldown duration inherently doesn't lead to a lot of gameplay impact or anything exciting really. If your raid leader starts to assign your
Spirit Link Totem to events that are less than 3 minutes apart, that is when you'll feel it the most as you're forced to look for opportunities to cast
Chain Heal enough times. But if
Spirit Link Totem isn't assigned (new boss, less structured raid or m+) and cast rather freely you might get an opportunity every now and then to use it early, but most of the time it'll likely have no impact at all.
Looking at the high amount of crit we're going to have next season, combined with the 2-Set crit bonus (assuming the
Chain Heal is consistently casted on
Riptide targets), each cast of
Chain Heal will reduce
Spirit Link Totem by 5 to 6 seconds on average - or in other words it would take around 12 2-Set buffed casts of
Chain Heal to reduce
Spirit Link Totem by a full minute. That number can be influenced by luck (less/more crits), targeting issues (all
Riptide targets are positioned awkwardly), mana issues (
Chain Heal is expensive) and there simply being nothing to heal.
The 4-Set bonus has synergies with anything that provides crit, so depending on covenant or legendaries you might see some difference in reductions but its too many small things to list out, with most of them not being too impactful.
It's hard to tell how much reduction you'll see though, as we're currently not using
Chain Heal a lot and we had no preview of the new raid yet, but judging by old logs (which had a differently tuned and cheaper
Chain Heal), you often see 5 to 6 casts of
Chain Heal a minute, which means that the
Spirit Link Totem cooldown with 4-Set should usually be around the 2 minute mark instead of 3 minutes.
Overall I'm not a fan of the 4-Set bonus and would've rather have seen something else. While it can be useful and may sometimes save a pull in m+ while also letting you use
Spirit Link Totem more frequently in raids, most of the time it won't add anything of value - and a situational tier set bonus does not feel great. Realistically this bonus may only see usage on a couple of fights per tier in actual gameplay, as they tend to space heavy raid damage out.