With today’s PTR update, some significant Shaman updates are now testable. Please discuss them here.
SHAMAN
Elemental
Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope (4) Set Bonus: Fixed an issue where Chain Lightning and Lightning Bolt were incorrectly highlighted after casting Primordial Wave.
Splintered Elements now grants you 20% Haste plus an additional 4% Haste per extra target hit by Primordial Wave, rather than 10% Haste per target hit.
Further Beyond can now only increase the duration of Further Beyond by up to 150% of the original duration of Ascendance.
Primordial Wave can no longer be used to heal a friendly ally, it is now only an offensive spell for Elemental Shaman.
Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope (4) Set Bonus has been redesigned – Lava Burst burns your target for 15% additional damage over 4 seconds, and after consuming Primordial Wave, your next 3 casts of Lava Burst also hit up to 3 additional targets affected by your Flame Shock for 100% of normal damage.
Enhancement
Developers’ note: We have shuffled a few talents around the Enhancement Shaman tree to increase some available talent choices. We’re also adjusting the functionality of a few talents to work with more melee abilities or elemental damage types to make them more attractive to a wider variety of builds. A new passive talent is available to choose rather than Elemental Blast to allow you to opt out of an extra keybind and Maelstrom Weapon spender to keep track of with Elemental Blast. We hope these changes give you some extra flexibility with your talent points and make some lesser used talents more impactful.
Several talents have been moved to a different place in the talent tree.
Starter build updated due to the pathing changes above.
Elemental Assault can now also generate Maelstrom Weapon charges from Ice Strike and Lava Lash rather than only Stormstrike.
Developers’ note: This change will be added in next week’s PTR update.
Legacy of the Frost Witch now also increases Frost damage when consuming 10 stacks of Maelstrom Weapon rather than only Physical damage.
Primordial Wave can no longer be used to heal a friendly ally, it is now only an offensive spell for Enhancement Shaman.
Splintered Elements now grants you 20% Haste plus an additional 4% Haste per extra target hit by Primordial Wave, rather than 10% Haste per target hit.
New Talent: Tempest Strikes (Passive) – Your Stormstrike, Lava Lash, and Ice Strike have a chance to cause bonus Nature damage to your target. Choice node with Elemental Blast.
Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope (2) Set Bonus: Fixed an issue that prevented the set bonus Feral Spirit from granting the player Maelstrom Weapon generation.
Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope (2) Set Bonus: Fixed an issue that prevented the set bonus from changing your Feral Spirit into a Spirit Raptor if glyphed for that effect.
Restoration
Primordial Wave can no longer be used to damage an enemy target, it is now only a healing spell for Restoration Shaman.
Sooooo… Elemental is now the only DPS spec with no raid buff. Thanks Blizz.
So, now either shunt Windfury into the class tree, or chuck us the 20% ST DPS buff that’d sling us into first place DPS so we might actually be considered for a raid spot please.
Let it be known, that i am not always negative, these are legitimately good changes.
Especially the new ele assault, which i personally suggested wink wink.
If there are a few things to say:
1: Wft should just be the shaman raid buff, no totem, no talent point. Just baseline, 60 min duration shaman raid buff.
2: I would like seeing elemental weapon become a 1 point talent with like 3/4% damage per imbue. Never been a big fan of this talent as it’s just damage, and making it 1 point would make it easier to path into p wave without losing something a bit too important before.
That’s honestly about it, i am shocked at how good enhance is at the moment.
Is there any particular reason for this? this is used in PvP often to get more Lava burstprocs to help to do more damage with your team.
Same goes for Mythic + - this change seems rather odd?
Restoration shaman is in one of the worst state it’s ever been. Not even considering the numbers, it’s the first time in many years I’m not looking forward to playing my main next tier because of how not engaging the gameplay is. We don’t play the game we play the tier set, there are no decision making involved, if we want to play at our best potential we just chase riptides with healing waves for the 4p bonus and that’s it.
Theun, a well known shaman in the community, already made a post giving more insight : Restoration Shaman Feedback 10.2 please take a moment to read through it.
You can tell the only one on the team working on shaman, plays ench, they get alterations to their tree, rest, has a ton of talents that should be baseline and points you have to spend just to get to things like cloudburst which are essential, and ele is one point away from being able to have a build that you can do decent ST and AOE with at the moment its one or the other not a balanced mix which makes M+ so hard, and they just nerf furth beyond so even though it was boring its all we had now we have nothing
For ele, the second to last row is all 2 pointers, i would adjust some to one pointers so we have some flexibility
for all spec trees i would free up some points by making all totems baseline to the spec, and replace them with optional talents that buff those totems, like restos living steam
remove the further beyond change, unless you buff the damage and healing provided to make it high burst and worth having for a limited time only
Restoration shaman feels really bad on PTR. The tier set makes us spam riptide and healing wave/surge no matter what. You’re not incentivized to stop healing when the raid is full health or your riptides won’t be spreading. When you weave in any dps globals you have less riptides spreading. Even pressing other healing spells like healing rain feel bad because it’s a global you’re not using to fish for riptide procs.
The design of the tier set forces us to go either all in on riptides and discard the rest of our class or completely ignore the tier set. Because riptide and Tidal Reservoir stacks are virtually always available it makes us not press anything else if the tier set is strong enough, apart from the occasional cloudburst, primordial wave or raid cooldown.
I’d like to see a change to how Tidal Reservoir is applied. For example if healing rain applied it instead of healing wave/surge we would have a lot more breathing room to be casting other spells. It would have to have some kind of prioritization for riptide targets because we give up on the control of who it goes on and obviously we still want it on riptide targets. Or make the application of Tidal Reservoir similar to Ancestral Vigor so we have more options to press.
On top of that something needs to be done about chain heal. With the recent buffs to healing wave and healing surge and the nerfs to resurgence it’s being heavily outperformed by healing wave/surge and there’s not really any reason to press it anymore, even if we did have the globals for it. That’s while having to invest several talent points into chain heal whereas healing wave costs no talent points to play around it.
Elemental shamans need raid utility. We barely compete with other dps classes in damage meter, we lack survivability and the few utility we have are outmatched by other classes who have the same utility. We are basically useless in a raid environment.
Why should I bring an Elemental shaman over a Warlock, Balance Druid, Mage or Priest in a raid spot? Even Hunters are more useful than us.
We are so useless that guild would rather stack more of the above classes instead of bringing a single Elemental shaman.
Really like the changes so far, but why do I have to take Lavalash and molten assault to get to Firenova/Hailstorm? I would like to play a heavy frost / physical build. But currently there is no way to select ice strike, hailstorm, legacy of the frost witch and the rest of the “standard physical / storm build”. I am not sure what the intention behind the frost witch changes are, but this could be a use case. With current tier set all builds need a least one point in primordial wave. So maybe some talents like elemental assault /legacy of the frost witch should be put in tier 3/4 of the talent tree and a new path from ice strike to hailstorm should be available. Really would love to play this kind of build. Might be less complex than the pure elemental build but due to hailstorm a bit more than the standard storm build.
Enhance main here, really great changes overall. My only wish would be to move Feral Lunge to a spot where it doesn’t feel awful to take for high end PvE content. An idea would be to make it a choice node with Spiritwalkers Grace or something similar. It is a very situational spell for PvE overall and feels illgeal to pick in the current tree.
Thanks for keeping Enhance so fun!
there is clearly a divide in the replies here, as i said in my first post, Ench is the only spec that seems to get any attention, and clearly Ench players overall happy, whilst resto and ele are just left to figure out how to play around the faults
I just wish enhance got some passive slow on target as in past Frostband Weapon was.
Windfury and Feral Lunge should be baseline spells without need of talent point spending. Feral Lunge might be even 20s cd or might have additional charge.
And would make sense if Enhance could choose Refreshing Waters and Focused Insight at the same time as ele.
Enhance is very good in PvE because the dmg output is very good imo and you do a good job there for sure.
These are just tips for enhance PvP players where are few gaps in the design from my point of view.
Please, Enha need a instant CC on PvP, is the unique posibility that this spec is viable again in PvP. Please instant hex 5 seconds, some stun, SOME INSTANT CC I Beg you Blizzard!!
Nice quality of life here. But kind of irrelevant really.
99% of healers use some sort of click-on-party-frame macro (or VooDoo/Healbot add-on) to cast stuff. Including PW. So the chances of making a “mistake” and casting it to an enemy is close to 0.
With that said, you guys have a LOT more work to do on Resto Shaman to make it a worthy spec. Because right now, its not what it should be.
And in the eventuality that the devs read this, here is a TLDR breakdown:
A) While the mana changes are nice, you forgot to tweek the cost of our spells. Especially considering that RShaman right NOW is borderline unplayable with out the Rashok Trinket. So we NEED more mana right now. And for S3 you nerf all mana sources with out changing the mana cost of our spells.
B) The rest of the changes to Resto Shaman (specific talents, nerfin and removing the smart heal of Ancestral Awakening, zero raid/party buffs…) have been addressed by many people. So I wont repeat that.
However, the TLDR here is that you are struggling to balance RShaman between raid and M+ settings. You nerf things so they dont become OP in a raid, fair enough, but it makes it terrible in M+. Or you buff things for raid balance, but it then makes us OP in M+. Our tier set for S3 is an example of that.
Just stop with this vicious cycle. Admit it. And just split things by raid/M+ effects. As you already did with Healing Tide Totem.
Then maybe you can make a decent, balanced spec for both M+ and Raid. I know you guys can do it.
Reason for absolutely not? Enhance does not have any cc just for the record. Not really useable for PvP I mean. Lasso is nice but doesnt really go well with enhance gameplay in compare to ele.
Very nice changes so far. Enhancement was already super fun to play and I didn’t realise you could make it even more fun. Good job with that!
What I would like to see: Windfury totem baseline. Even now picking windfury totem in AoE scenario is DPS loss for a shaman. With new talent changes it may be DPS loss even in ST which is really weird design - all specs have their raid buffs baseline and they are plain DPS gain. Meanwhile shammies not only have to use GCD every 2 min but also spend talent point for it.
Enhance does not have any cc just for the record. Not really useable for PvP I mean. Lasso is nice but doesnt really go well with enhance gameplay in compare to ele.