Maelstrom gone? Good. Hated to play a shaman with 2 spells having a whole new resource bar that required being in combat for quite a while to build up.
Earth Shock tuned down and Lava Burst buffed? Good, now work on Lava Surge so it’s not instant cast. It does not need to be instant cast. It is Fire school, so nothing happens when it gets kicked, and it should be better DPS option than Bolt/Chain anyway so resetting CD is enough. What does need instant cast procs is Lightning Bolt, because it’s spammed filler, it is Nature spell so when it’s kicked the Shaman is pretty much unable to do anything, and it would give some much needed mobility.
Chain Lightning still AOE instead of cleave, even with just 10% damage loss per target? Bleh. For sustained AoE unprune Magma Totem, Chain was cleave until Pandaria and it worked well. Nowadays Elemental has NO cleave, just single target or AoE, and its damage is scaled badly to force it into AoE role because at 2 targets Bolt deals better damage than Chain. Because reasons. Solution: Chain back to cleave type spell - slight damage loss with every target hit after 1st, add some always available AoE spell like Magma Totem.
Flame Shock reduced duration would be acceptable if FS would also have shorter cooldown. Or Lava Burst would add few seconds more to its duration. Or haste increased its duration instead of making it tick faster. 18s is kinda short when you go hurt some dummies and realize it’s just 2 Lava Bursts, maybe 3 if you have 0 latency, tons of haste gear and Korean reflexes.
Ascendancy screws rotation up. Leveling ele shammy with 8s Ascendancy proc legendary shows just how much: unleash that big bad spender, get proc, now cast nothing but Lava Bursts, ignore maelstrom building up, ignore master of elements getting wasted, just throw burning pebbles at target. Lava Beam spam is hilarious but again resource capping is bad and damage increased when you are deliberately not targeting that which you WANT to hurt is just dumb. Replace it with Elemental Mastery - 15s 3m cd that grants say 15-20% spell haste. Forcing overloads on everything is too much in certain situations so let’s agree Stormkeeper does not belong here.
Mastery needs reworking because it scales badly or rather it doesn’t. Too RNGey, you either get big procs and rule the meters, or you don’t and you suck, you need to be 2/3rds in the game to get it, and the big spenders don’t cause overloads anyway. Solution: Lower damage (increasing with more Mastery), higher proc chance, base spell damage increased so Shaman can kill something without reliance on Mastery gear or being high enough level to have Mastery. In Wrath it was 33% chance for proc, 50% damage, and worked only off Lightning Bolt & Chain because Lava Burst was already the one cd to rule them all and fillers needed some love. End result was that Bolt dealt some 65-70% of Lava Burst damage and had 20% longer cast time, so Lava was definitely something to build a rotation on, not another weak proc to throw at the target while you wait for the big spender. Mastery should be a bonus to already well-working rotation, not a crutch.
And this big spender is guilty of taking too long to build up. Fulmination was introduced in Cata as the way to make Elemental very simple “FS-LVB-Bolt spam until LVB is ready or FS ends” rotation more interesting (and demanding). While adding builder/spender elements (sorry, couldn’t resist) into CD based rotation generally was meh, more flexibility is good - as long as spender isn’t hitting 4x harder than the main spec cooldown, which is what we have now. Tuning ES damage under LVB but over Bolt is good.
Seismic Thunder is something I missed (didn’t play WoD), but it means Elemental cannot cast its most powerful AoE spell instantly when needed, you have to wait and build it up. So when you can, you don’t have any targets left for your grand AoE because DHs already wasted 'em with eye beams. This is BAD. How bad? There was a period in BFA prepatch (summer 2018) when people were literally asking me what is that blue class I play. Because nobody in their right mind would ever play a Shaman back then, so screwed they were. THAT bad. Maybe just remove Earthquake and bring back DPS fire totems?
Totems in general should be unpruned together with 3 Call of Something spells that allowed you to have set up 3 combinations of totems and instantly cast 4 totems you wanted to use right now. Otherwise totems will be judged harshly by their value/GCD ratio and thus will be hidden in walls, shrubs, or just stay unused.
Most wanted would be Stoneclaw - on-demand absorb shield is a must, because Shamans currently have NO absorb at all unless they get legendary neck or azerite trait and it SUCKS to have your already long as entrails cast time pushed back just because a mob hit you for 1 hp. So cast Stoneclaw Totem, have 20-25% HP as absorb shield, duration say 30 seconds and cd 25, like mage shields, keep calm and cast lightning bolts.
Another good totem would be Flametongue/Wrath for Intellect buff, unique to class/spec buffs instantly make for mandatory X in group and thus such things should be available in several ways.
I’d also unprune Earthbind by several expansions back to time when it rooted everything around for 5s for additional defense vs melee players/mobs.
Mages already have AoE roots, snares, and shields, so why Shammies cannot have nice toys? Oh wait, they DID have them, but got unpruned cuz spec fantasy! So let’s agree this never happened and bring the utilities back.
