Following the reveal of January 23rd class tuning, i have to say that shaman feels like a forgotten and ignored class.
Both enhance and elemental has huge problems in both raid and m+, and it feels incredibly weird to not see any changes happen for them.
Both specs really suffer in mass AoE scenarios and still gets beaten by mass AoE classes in 6 target scenarios.
Both specs gets bottlenecked in high m+ and raid content due to a massive lack of defensives that needs to be looked at before War Within.
Both specs have inherent talents that are massive design flaws, which should promptly also be looked at before War Within.
Damage tuning ideas
Enhancement:
Well enhance doesnt have an inherent mass AoE spender like Earthquake, but it has abilities like fire nova. Its supposed to compete with Hailstorm, the idea being that Hailstorm is a 6 target cleave and Fire Nova beats it in mass AoE. The reality is that Fire nova is undertuned and does no single target damage. Here are some ideas that you can implement:
- Fire Nova’s cooldown reduced to 7 seconds (was 15)**
- Fire Nova triggers an additional time when only hitting 2 or less enemies.**
- Fire Nova damage increased by 20%**
In Dragonflight, Fire Nova was a maelstrom weapon steroid. This will help it even more. you would gain 2 stacks of maelstrom weapon in ST and 4 stacks in 2target cleave. its up often enough to be useful and it can outscale Hailstorm.
Elemental:
Elemental is a 1 button class currently and only want to use their spenders to gain lava surge from Windspeaker’s. Maybe take a look at their spenders. Keep buffing it slightly every week untill it matches Lava burst in AoE.
- Earthquake damage increased by 30%
Just untill you hit the number so its worth pressing again.
disgustingly squishy class
Shaman as a whole suffers greatly from having no defensives. both passive and active mitigation is in the toilet bowl. That means that we are bottlenecked from pushing top keys, and we are heavily reliant on externals because of a major design flaw in modern m+. In raid we cannot do certain mechanics cause we just fall over. These are mechanics like holding the burning seed on mythic Fyrakk.
Here is a great Wordup tweet to summarize my beliefs
We have a single strong defensive in Astral shift. Earth elemental is way too little gain for how long of a CD it is. Spirit wolf takes 4 seconds to even activate. Nature’s Guardian is week and unoticeable.
Here are some ideas that could be implemented for season 4:
- Spirit Wolf now instantly grants 20% damage reduction, which decays every 2 seconds
- Earth Elemental now absorbs 30% damage in addition to granting you 15% maximum health
- Earth Elemental is now a 2 minute cooldown and has a 25 second duration
P.S add Harden skin back to Primal Elementalist. Just make it a 20% damage reduction with these changes.
Any raidbuffs?
Elemental and Restoration shaman are the only specs in the game without a raid buff. Enhance is the only spec in the game that has to use a spec point to get their raid buff. Enhance is only allowed 29/30 spec points in raid content.
Please find a raidbuff for elemental and restoration and make it a class tree point. Make it a choice node with Windfury totem.
These talents are problematic or useless
Without saying much, its time to look at Deeply Rooted Elements.
a single talent that disrupts the natural flow of both specs to just press the button that has a chance to give them ascendance is both unfun and unintelligent.
Both specs would rather press their lottery button than spend resources.
Maybe remake these talents so you gain ascendance whenever you press your cooldown like Primordial wave for Elemental and Doom winds for Enhancement.
Doom Winds needs to be moved to a capstone area. And then revert all the nerfs that happened in Dragonflight beta.
Primal elementalist sucks and is a choice node for the only Mass AoE that elemental has currently and their best way of spreading flame shock.
Primal elementalist is incredibly weak and shares a point with one of their best talents.
It needs to be moved and buffed.
Echoes of the great sundering makes a dumb AoE rotation where you would want to weave in ST spenders.
You can just make the talent:
double the amount of Maelstrom required to use spenders and also double their damage.
That was all that i wanted to talk about. Hope the devs can figure this out and help our specs.