Elemental Shaman T31 Feedback

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T31 effects

(2) Set Bonus: Primordial Wave also casts an Elemental Blast at the target at 100% effectiveness, and grants you all three Elemental Blast bonus effects for 15.0 seconds.

(4) Set Bonus: For 10 seconds after using Primordial Wave, whenever you consume Lava Surge, your next Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning is instant cast and deals 25% increased damage.

First things first. Without being talented into Primordial Wave these bonuses do nothing. Which means, we’re forced into taking this talent for the next tier.

2p

The additional damage from Elemental Blast on Primordial Wave is a great way to improve the immediate value and feel of the talent. While applying Flame Shock is a good feature to have, adding the damage makes casting it so much more rewarding.

Furthermore this effect grants all three Elemental Blast buffs. These present a sizeable chunk of stats.

The additional Elemental Blast is cast for free. And there exist multiple talents triggered by casting Elemental Blast. Here is a table of them and whether they are triggered by the 2p effect.

Talent 2p can trigger it
Surge of Power :x: no
Lightning Rod :white_check_mark: yes
Mountains Wills Fall :white_check_mark: yes
Further Beyond :white_check_mark: yes
Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence :white_check_mark: yes

4p

This bonus is a neat idea. It suggests to weave our different spell schools. The benefit would be Lightning cast similarly empowered like with a weak Stormkeeper. Well, except the damage amplification is a lot lower in single target and no Overloads are forced.

At the time of writing it’s unclear if the 4p is intended to stack and get consumed with an active Stormkeeper or not. The latter could mean we’ll sit on these effects until all of them are consumed and very likely waste/overwrite stacks of the tier set. The former would make Lightning Bolt hit even harder, providing yet another multiplier on top of the already existing stack of the current Lightning Build.

Sadly this bonus is currently very weak overall. Just as a reminder, thanks to Unrelenting Calamity Lightning cast change only from 1.75s casttime to a 1.5s casttime with the 4p. Having more instants is always a great thing for movement, though.

Synergies / Builds

Here comes the elephant in the room. Further Beyond. By combining Deeply Rooted Elements, Primordial Surge, Aftershock, and Further Beyond we can go for infinite Ascendance.

While we normally moan that Ascendance isn’t very strong, this build generates a lot more value than baseline Ascendance could generate. This value is driven by the free Lava Bursts and Flame Shock refreshes from Deeply Rooted Elements procs, while Primordial Wave also refreshes Flame Shock between Deeply Rooted Elements procs and also extends Ascendance thanks to Further Beyond.

This might sounds cool, but it deteriorates the gameplay loop to pure spam-casting Lava Burst into Elemental Blast with the occasional (once every ~30s) Primordial Wave. Any talent points invested in e.g. Lightning or Icefury are wasted while Ascendance is active.

And in case the above didn’t hint at it yet: the 4p bonus is absolutely useless while in Ascendance. Making this build essentially play with only one tier bonus.

The problem? It looks like these builds are going to be the strongest by far. With a similar distinction in power as current Lightning versus everything else.

Issues

The 2p Elemental Blast starts to fly at our target once the Primordial Wave bullet hits.

This delay is noticeable and slightly disconnecting.

The 2p stat buff durations are overwritten by follow-up Elemental Blast cast or the Overload of the initial effect.

Which means their uptime can accidentally get reduced.

The 4p effect can easily get overwritten by itself. Introducing stacks to the buff could help a lot.

The 4p effect is not consumed.

Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning can neither generate Maelstrom, nor can they overload with the 4p bonus active.

Lava Beam is not affected by 4p.

In case the permanent Ascendance stays, we’ll get tuned around being in it at all times. But mechanics will force us out of it, and while we wait for the next proc, we’ll quickly fall off the expected target dps. I imagine this to be a balancing nightmare, so I hope this won’t go live as is.

As a broad scale issue, returning to a Fire build means we’ll once again have to chose between single target damage and AoE damage. This is due to the way the Fire focused talents are setup and their effects. Lightning on the other hand isn’t facing this issue at all, because all Lightning talents combine single target and AoE.

Conclusion

The tier set is a good idea. Weaving spell schools makes sense for what Elemental consists of. The current version of 4p is too weak to actually promote this gameplay, though. Infinite Ascendance needs to get removed. It deteriorates the gameplay and invalidates many talents. This way I hope multiple different flavors of weaving talent combinations will emerge.

Yours sincerely,
Bloodmallet

7 Likes
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2 Piece should be disassociated from Primordial Wave, since that’s just forcing us into Fire build. No lightning build takes primordial wave and it has no synergy with general lightning playstyles, and there’s no particular reason for it to be the chosen spell for this effect, other than to force us to completely re-gear from this seasons crit-heavy builds…

4 piece needs some serious work. Autocrit for LB/CL might be a better option, and would at least align the stat requirements for using lightning when in a fire build, but even that is likely less attractive than just consuming more lava surges or fishing for DRE procs with FS rolling on max targets. Lightning Bolt itself would likely need a substantial damage buff to the base spell co-eff to make us want to cast it.

Another problem is that, as it stands, these tier bonuses serve to highlight core issues in the spec which haven’t been addressed:

The entire DRE playstyle is excessively RNG dependent and leads to an incredibly boring rotation of just constant LvB spam as we fish for procs and pray. Oath of the Farseer is a bad talent to combine with DRE, but consumes 2 talent points to get to Further Beyond. Further Beyond enables the ‘permanent Ascendance’ option, and so likely ought to be removed for the reasons Bloodmallet has already so ably outlined.

Tbh, there’s also just too many RNG effects at play for elemental anyway, and most of them are too powerful to be random in this manner. Lava Surge is random. DRE is random. Aftershock is random. Overloads are random, which in turn means resource generation has a significant random component. These are very large, very powerful elements of our damage output which we have little to no control over, so when they are the ‘strongest’ talent loadout, the result is wildly variable dps from the exact same input.

The Elemental tree is bottom-heavy and has a huge number of 2-point talents, many of which are weak. Capstones are also largely unimpressive. There are relatively few options above the first and second gates, forcing us to take talents which a given build may get zero benefit from. Given that most other classes have had 2-point talents heavily reduced and have also been given additional links through the tree, this makes the Elemental tree feel inflexible and dated.

The lack of any benefit to LvB from crit means that this stat becomes pretty useless, but Chain Lightning and other AOE components are clearly scaled on the assumption of lightning-build crit levels. This has constantly left LvB in the position of either being useless, or the only thing worth casting. This is very unhealthy and needs to change, either through adding a crit-to-damage conversion for LvB or possibly by buffing LvB substantially and removing Lava Surge so that LvB spam becomes effectively impossible.

1 Like
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Thanks for the great detailed post.

We really need to have our specc looked at for the upcoming season and not just a ‘fix’ to the Further Beyond playstyle.

If that gets fixed without any viable alternative we are in a horrendous balance spot with zero raid utility, mediocre m+ utility, lacking defensives and build paths that can’t do AoE or ST without getting enormous losses in either.

1 Like
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This is just side note i agree with you this kind of design is bad
because Frost DK has the same issue
tier set is build around chill streak.