Make Glyph of Elemental Mastery lower the GCD cap while the buff is active

Copying this post from Pinstripe on US forums so us EU folks can also comment on the issue:

Elemental Shaman has been an incredibly fun spec during WOTLK up to this point, despite its consistent middle-of-the-pack performance. This has drastically changed in ICC, and one of the primary factors is the frequency with which the Elemental Mastery cooldown makes us hit the GCD cap when stacked with any other haste buff. In practice, using EM with other haste buffs active at current gear levels results in somewhere between a 0-5% haste increase, instead of the intended 15%. This is a problem for a few reasons:

  1. Most specs are able to stack their DPS cooldowns with other major haste buffs (Bloodlust, Engi gloves, etc). Pressing major cooldowns during lust is fun! Avenging Wrath, Berserk, Summon Gargoyle, etc. all feel great to press during lust. But if Elemental Mastery is stacked with these cooldowns, it often adds less damage than if we waited until lust was over.
  2. Our Tier-10 set bonus centers around using EM as soon as possible to start benefiting from from the cooldown reduction. This creates a frustrating interaction: you want to hit EM as soon as it becomes available, but waiting until Bloodlust ends might provide more damage due to the GCD cap.
  3. The ease with which we hit the GCD cap is a major ceiling for our damage. We’ve effectively stopped scaling with Haste, and already get no benefit from Crit on Lava Burst and Fire Elemental Totem. We have fallen from middle-of-the-pack to nearly last place on damage, which has caused even 99-parsing Ele Shamans to have difficulty getting invites to raids.

This problem could be partially addressed by updating Glyph of Elemental Mastery to (in addition to its current effect) also reduce the GCD cap to 0.75 seconds during the duration of the buff.

As with all Ele shaman changes, we know it’s important to consider PvP impact, as the spec is already strong and well represented in 3v3 and 5v5. This suggestion would have little to no impact in PvP, as it doesn’t make the Glyph strong enough to be a guaranteed pick in that setting. If it were picked, it would come at the cost of our defensive options, Glyph of Thunder of Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem. There would only be any PvP impact when either Bloodlust or Lava Flows are active in addition to EM, and only while this Glyph was slotted. In addition, all 3 of these buffs are purgeable. These factors combined should make a minimal impact on PvP.

This change would begin to solve the issues noted above and would be a quality of life improvement for the spec. The numerical impact would be very moderate (roughly 350 DPS, or 2.3%, based on our sim), and there is ample precedent for something like this with the changes to Feral and Ret. In fact, both the Feral and Ret changes had a much larger impact than this would, and they are in the top 1/3rd of damage specs currently.

Some alternative buffs we’ve considered asking for are:

  • Glyph of Elemental Mastery adds the 15% Fire, Frost, and Nature damage bonus that it provides in Cataclysm.
    • This would be a slightly larger damage buff (roughly 430 DPS, or 2.8%), but also makes the Glyph more attractive in PvP. If we went this route, we’d expect that the damage bonus have no effect in PvP, the same as the Glyphs added to Retribution and Feral.
  • Glyph of Lightning Bolt gives 10% instead of 4% damage
    • This would be roughly 600 DPS, or 3.9%, buff in PvE, and would set up Glyph of Lightning Bolt to be on par with other primary-filler Glyphs in Cataclysm like Glyph of Mind Flay and Glyph of Wrath.
  • Glyph of Ghost Wolf allows Ghost Wolf to be used indoors
    • This is purely a QoL buff. Ele Shaman has the least mobility options of any caster in Wrath. Blink, Demonic Circle, Cat Form+Dash give large on-demand mobility, while Shadow Priest has many instant GCDs, including spammable Imp. Devouring Plague, to cast while moving. Ele Shaman has none of that; we can cast one Frost Shock, and after that we have nothing to cast for 3 seconds if we must keep moving. This also has close to zero impact on PvP as Ghost Wolf is already usable in all Arenas and most Battleground areas.

I’d like to note that even if all of these buffs were implemented, we’d still be well below the damage of specs like Feral, Unholy, Fire Mage, and Affliction.

19 Likes

This. Don’t let the shaman dps spec die because of poor tier and mobility.

4 Likes

#GiveBoomiesAWorthWhile3dMajorGlyph

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I personally really like the QoL that the EM GCD change would bring since it feels really dumb that you hit a “haste cap” if you use your CD’s.

But DPS wise it seems like it still doesn’t make a big enough difference to make us “viable”.

I’m really happy we have a lot of discussion about this on the Elemental Shaman discord and I hope we get some action from Blizzard. I believe it was Sarthe interviewing some Classic devs where they commented that there were no plans for class changes but that they would look into it if some class or spec became underrepresented in raids, this seems like exactly that.

4 Likes

I dunno if this issue is specific to shamans, but the first wrath warlock guide I browsed warned me not to invest into haste too much, cause hitting the cap is very easy with bloodlust and other effects.
Is there no other gear for shamans that has say, crit instead of haste?

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We already staggered our CDs during Ulduar, now it’s much worse. Our totems gives us 200-220 haste with 100% uptime. Gear with lots of haste is our BiS.

Problem with crit, Lava Burst has 0 benefit from it, Clearcasting approaches 80% uptme
with diminshing returns and drops value of additional crit further.

2 Likes

nice reverse psychology suddo, now they’ll finally nerf you shamans :smiley:

2 Likes

It is just ridiculous honestly. Getting into a raid as ele sham now almost impossible (only if you have rsham rolling in). I’m not that bad as ele, 99+ all phases, but all your buffs are easily replaceable by other classes that do much more - what is the point of bringing ele to the raid?

We got this crap as t10 bonuses while other classes has 10-15% increasing flat dmg buffs. And its not just that: thanks for a very stable mechanic with 2p10 cooldown reduction - sometimes your skill goes on CD for 7 days (!!!) and you can’t use it until encounter ends. And i’m not even taking into consideration this very pleasurable time where your felem could just say “f you” and standing still taking some photos nearby (won’t mention encounters where he literally dies 30sec in and you should drop everything just to heal him)

4 Likes

Trust me, the Ele Shaman community has looked at gearing alternatives, and there just isn’t. We’ve been staggering CDs since Ulduar to avoid haste capping ourselves, but higher ilvl = more haste across the board, and its becoming an even bigger “problem” now.
Also keep in mind LB has a 2 second long cast time, already relatively low for a main rotational spell (CL is even worse with 1.5 seconds), and that Elemental Mastery is, together with Fire Ele, our only real DPS cooldown.

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Thanks for duplicating this to EU forums, giving this post my full support. Hope this or the US post gets noticed and there is some traction.

I think changing the GCD ceiling during Elemental Mastery is a genius solution that is both in the spirit of the spell and also should not affect any form of ranked pvp in WotLK Classic

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Yeah I remember staggering my CDs as Arcane in TBC and that was no fun at all. Hope you guys get your wish granted.

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Yea I really hope Blizzard listens, looking at wclogs it’s clear that Eleshamans are losing raid spots hard, and falling fast on the dps ranking. We’re currently the last “real dps spec”.

very cool, thanks :+1:

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Me as an enhancement player I still agree with these suggestions and support these changes #ACDC #Voltage #EletricManNeedsBuff

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I agree 100% on this. Bump this!

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100% Agree.

The latest DPS rankins show that Elemental has fallen below Blood Death Knights in dps. We are the worst dps spec in the game and only brought in to press lust or if the group doesnt have a boomkin for 5% spell crit. Enhance isnt doing much better either which is also in the bottom of the DPS tier, altho a bit better than elemental. The class is slowly dieing and only brought for a crit buff or bloodlust, and even that mostly is covered by guilds brining 1 resto shaman.

Please Blizzard do something about it. You buffed Feral cat dps and it went from middle of the pack to now being by far the best dps in the game. This just doesn’t seem fair at all.

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We don’t benefit from crit as much as you’d think since Lava Burst is already 100% crit and fire ele gets nothing from it. We naturally have a lot of crit already anyways and most of our gear just tends to have haste on it.

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For once, Blizzard. Help the underdogs!

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Elemental shaman has been overtaken by Arms warriors, Beast Mastery hunters and Sublety rogues now, which arent really even brought to raids as these classes have far superior specs already. Slowly but surely the Frost mage is creeping closer and closer and soon enough there wont be a single spec worse in this game than the ele shaman. Please consider buffing the ele shaman!

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