For some reason, the blizzard-made feedback posts only exists on US forums, so here on EU we got to make our own.
This post is to make constructive feedback rather than “This is bad and you guys should be fired”
I will try my best to highlight the painpoints that i see for Elemental - Though unfortunately not for Resto shaman as i do not play healers. I hope this post inspires a resto shaman to convey their follies with this hero tree well.
It should be known that we do not know the full story of shaman currently. We have seen a single hero tree and havent seen if they are overhauling the base specilization tree.
Unfortunately that means that we have to treat Farseer with the current dragonflight talent tree in mind. Though take it with a grain of salt.
Pros - Great theme!
Many people have wished for Ancestry to return to shaman instead of just being a lavaslinger or thundercaller.
Cons - Uninspired gameplay, Laser-focused rotation, does little to help the defensive situation, Utility still lacking, Promotes the dicotomy of Lightning vs Fire
Unispired gameplay:
While the theme of calling your ancestors are great, it still just happens while you are lava slinging You press Primordial Wave, and now you get an additional mastery. Its something that you will ignore and just continue your rotation, as if you are still playing Dragonflight. You might as well not be level 80.
Laser-focused gameplay:
Currently, a majority of your damage comes from lava burst. Many woes have come from the Elemental community that Spenders feel like a joke. And they are! In many Single target/cleave situations its better to press Lava burst over spenders currently. Unfortunately all spenders are weak and under-designed.
Unfortunately, Farseer doesnt want to fix this issue.
Elemental Reverb will increase the damage of your lava bursts by a little bit,
You spawn ancestors by using Pwave, forcing yourself into lava bursts again.
And Routine communication is just the cherry on top.
Many woes from the Shaman community as a whole is “Deeply Rooted Elements promotes unfun and monotone gameplay.”
Routine Communication unfortunately skyrockets here. Its essentially Deeply Rooted Elements 2.
You place Cooldown reduction on a major cooldown inside of this tree. Normally for nearly any other spec that would be amazing - Unfortunately the elementals are really underpowered. Fire elemental is such a small damage increase that Final Calling might be a higher dps increase.
While we dont know if Fire elemental is getting reworked, we do know that Fire elemental is very bad currently.
Notice how i only talked about fire elemental here, even though it also works for Storm Elemental. Thats because, if you are focusing this much on fire build with lava burst and Primordial wave, then Elemental doesnt even want to be pressing Lightning bolt and Chain lightning.
Lastly the capstone of this tree.
It doesnt make sense. It seems like there was no endgoal for this hero tree and just slammed something in there. The fire build, which this hero tree heavily wants to be played alongside, has a lot of instant cast abilities already. for M+ you arent even taking Elemental blast. That means the only 2 abilities that consistantly has a cast time is Lightning bolt and chain lightning. But i already established that those abilities are not very worth globals in the fire build.
The defensive and utility situation:
When reading different hero trees, it has been a general consensus that hero trees have defensive nodes in them to help the defensive gap of classes. This gap has widended in Dragonflight unlike any other expansion. So when seeing Death knights gaining random AMS procs or crazy passive Damage reduction, you would believe that shamans would be getting something massive. Shamans are among the worst classes defensively. Unfortunately it didnt happen. Its a really bad omen to send to the next 2 shaman trees.
Your Pseudo-cheat death heals 5% more and happens a little bit more often is nice, but doesnt stop oneshots. Your earth shield healing more and having more stacks is also nice, but doesnt stop oneshots. It feels like its completely designed with PvP in mind. Mind you, that PvP has its own set of tuning knobs and can always just retune these defensives to not be overpowered in that gamemode. Yet PvE needs to suffer greatly, cause Rsham and Ele sham can find some success in there?
Shamans have very little Damage reduction to their name. I am genuinely appalled at this defensive node and cannot give any helpful criticism other than This needs to be thought out again. its unfortunate that we even thought this would fair.
Also, The tree doesnt seem to grant shamans any nice utility. Both elemental and Resto lacks a raidbuff badly. Since we dont know whaat the base tree is gonna look like, it would have been very helpful to see a dev note telling us to not worry about this glaring issue. - Like you did for Riders of the Apocolypse and Death and Decay.
Likewise just general utility like the node in Druid of the Claw granting more duration on Stampeding roar.
Shamans (all 3 specs) need more defensives. And utility (useful utility. Were packed with useless utility). We lack in that department. Rshaman needs an external and some form of “Shield”. We also need damage to healing and healing to damage mechanics which we dont have. Just to mention a few of the things RShaman needs.
But Hero Talents are NOT supposed to replace the dissaster of a talent tree we have. They should FIRST fix those talents (for all 3 specs).
In them, they should include defensives and utility in line with other specs (or take it away from other specs).
And THEN and ONLY then they should design Hero Talents. And starting with these. They suck. Bad.
As a healer I dont want RNG. I dont want MORE riptide. I DONT like to be shoe-horsed into a talent/abiliy…
Get rid of them and re-do them. And Ancestors? What a joke. NOBODY wants ancestors. What we want is elementals.
All 3 shaman specs needs more defensive love. I stated that as well. I also stated that every hero tree has defensive nodes and usually the classes with very low defensive value gets a talent node that helps a lot, and usually classes with a high amount of defensives gets slightly weak defensive nodes. They just flunked here on Farseer while giving really strong defensives to classes like DK or mage. which really dont need the help.
I am also saying quite a few times that we just dont know how the base tree is going to look in The War Within. And they most likely have made hero trees after making the base tree. We just dont know yet. Therefore some clarifications and dev notes would have been really nice.
So we cant really comment on the potential damage of this hero tree but only design and gameplay implications.
Hello,
here my personal view on Farseer from elemental view.
(I hope I write clearly because my English is really bad.^^)
Assumption: All talent trees doesn’t change.
Assumption: For easy tuning “similar spells” will be like the small trees of restoration druids: They cast something, but they get no buffs from talents and also don’t trigger talents.
Call of the Ancestors
I have to talent primordial wave for Farseer:
Okay, could be worse. But that means when I have a T-Set that promotes Fire (like T31) I don’t have a choice if I want to play Farseer or Stormbringer and that is bad.
We get uncontrollable pets:
And we get all the problems that come with it … “not in range”, “open CC”, “add the pat”, “not in line” till there will be time to fix it.
Latent Wisdom
Nothing interesting. More damage is everytime good, even if only for the ancestors.
Ancient Fellowship
Nothing interesting. Ancestors will do damage, so more of them sounds well, but I don’t like the random part.
Heed my Call
Nothing interesting. Ancestors will do damage, so when they do it for a longer time, fine.
Routine Communication
Nothing interesting. Ancestors will do damage, so more of them sounds well, but I don’t like the random part.
Elemental Reverb
Interesting. But not positive:
We will cast a lot of Lava Bursts to get more Primordial Wave. So it’s nice to have them do more damage and the extra charge prevents us from having to cast other spells:
That sounds boring. I don’t wanna be a Fire Mage in Chain Armor.
Offering from Beyound
Nothing interesting. More Fire Elemental uptime means more often faster ticking Flame Shocks, means more Lava Surge procs, means more Primordial Wave, means more Ancestors, means more Damage. Fine, if main time casting Lava Burst wouldn’t be so boring.
Primordial Capacity
Nothing interesting. Like the “additional Lava Burst Charge”-node also this is just a safety, that if we don’t have any Lava Burst left we have more maelstrom for “Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence” for getting a Lava Surge and so then again Lava Burst. Fine, if main time casting Lava Burst wouldn’t be so boring.
Spiritwalker’s Momentum
19 seconds instead of 15 seconds. 27% buff!
(Does we have any encounter that has an Intermission/Ability which lasts longer then 15 seconds and needs constant movement during max damage is needed?)
Nature Harmony
Nothing interesting. Saving healer mana over a dungeon (Our Healer normally doesn’t have mana problems) / raid boss fight (Our Healer normally have only mana problems when we don’t play boss mechanics correct and that means the problem is somewhere else), but doesn’t help against One-Shots or really heavy AoE (it only triggers once for only 25% health)
Earthen Communion
Nothing interesting. 12 instead of 9 charges means 33% Buff!
Well, even now I find enough time to recast it between two pulls (m+) or during movement when nothing good is ready (raid boss).
Maelstrom Supremacy
Nothing interesting. We only spend maelstrom to get a Lava Surge when we are out of Lava Burst. Not because the spenders does damage. 8% more doesn’t change that.
Final Calling
Very interesting. But not positive:
“nearby”? Not my target? That sounds a lot like “open CC” and “Pull not-in-fight trash group” till there is time to fix it.
When we also get the buff from Elemental Blast and not only the damage, it’s fine.
Ancestral Swiftness
Interesting. But not positive:
It forces me do talent a capstone in the class tree, else i get no ancestor. A capstone I normally ignore as I have with Lava Surge, Flame Shock, Earth shock/Earthquake, Icefury empowered Frost Shocks (, recast Earth Shield ) enough for two-step-moves out of ground effects.
It is only interesting for Elemental Blast, as Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning hopefully neither will be cast as they do no significant damage. So we have to skill Elemental Blast, else the capstone does nothing interesting.
Conclusion
Calling Ancestor is indeed a save method for the promise “we don’t change playstyle with Hero Talents”. I like that promise! But I don’t like that I will have no choice which Hero Talent Tree i have to take as it seems
Fire T-Set = Farseer
Storm T-Set = Stormbringer
I’m an Elemental Shaman, that means all Elements and not only one.
The not-DPS nodes: I’m pretty sure I will not notice them when switching between Farseer and Stormbringer.
Please and do not forget with Farseer Build we will be forced to take “dead” talents (element weaving) which interact with our LB and CL which we wont be casting. or we need to take clunky ice fury which mostly doesn’t interact with our mastery
And we will also have completely useless stat Critical Strike. so if we want to switch build we will need to carry 2 sets of gear. and you can see that issue in S3 and S4
PW is slightly better version of Unleash Elements (which was already bad).
Our Pinnacle Hero Talent improves a spell which gets improved by casting Nature spells if you take the talent (which we wont be casting).
And personally i hate Ice Fury gameplay from bottom of my heart.
Honestly the Elemental shaman didn’t receive any meaningful update since MoP.
) enough for two-step-moves out of ground effects.