I play Elemental Shaman since a while, my 2nd main in Dragonflight is Evoker.
To me, both specs are quite similar in terms of dps, single target or AOE ( Evoker have more pure burst but ele sham damage is more consistent if the fight is longer )
The difference is that the skillcap is way higher in Ele sham and that you have to play decently to try to deal a decent amount of damage, but even like that you’re behind specs using 3 spells to burst?
Evokers also have more survivability, mobility and even a defensive cd for their group.
Seeing raid stats/M+ stats both specs are really close to each other so why would Evoker get some huge buffs while Ele gets nothing?
What’s more, the other issue encountered in Dragonflight to get taken into groups is that everyone wants Enhancement shamans, no one wants Elemental. Usually, to get in high keys if elemental is such behind other specs, I just switch to heal in M+, but no one wants rSham either ( while Evoker heal spec is turbo op )
Whatever, let’s hope Blizzard finally show us some love in next weeks since like in every beginning of expansion we’re in the low tier specs
Elemental is in a great shape and has a lot of survivability/mobility. Healing stream, wind rush and other totems, earth shield, lightning shield, ghust of wind, ghost wolf, earth elemental, refreshing waters / primordial bond, elemental warding, thunderstorm,…
If I’m wanted though group finder or not is quite irrelevant to me as it’s always better to find a guild to progress with consistently.
The point is to make Evoker more attractive for players. I went to many raids so far and we never had an Evoker as a DPS once. And even if both specs are similar damage-wise in raid logs, shamans have a bit more utility spells.
Hopefully there’ll be more feedback from other players so I can make sure whether am wrong or not.
Of course, if you don’t play M+ at a high level for you Elemental must be in a great shape and I didn’t say that the spec isn’t fun to play, even though it is underperforming compared to other specs at a high level.
You have less defensive cds than most of the specs and what are your utility spells in raid as elemental shaman that are better than Evoker ones?
As for the evoker population, https ://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31
https ://raider.io/mythic-plus-rankings/season-df-1/all/world/leaderboards
There is already a lot of people playing evoker, at least more than shaman as you can see.
Elemental has among the worst survivabilities of all speccs.
Elemental can do very high ST or very high Aoe (if tank holds mobs together), it cannot do both. My analysis of Elementals biggest drawback in DPS is its long ramp-up time for AoE while most encounters and M+ require a more burstier form of AoE like e.g. WW Monk / DH offers.
Elemental needs a slight rework for increased survivability and increased burst-AoE. Elemental needs about 5-seconds to set up proper AoE; LMT, Primordial Wave, SB, LB, CL, Earthquake x2, CL, Earthquake x2. By the time you did 1/3 of that rotation, the Demon Hunter and WW Monk and Fury Warrior has already killed all adds.
