Windfury - not as much “RNG” but still a chance based mechanic. Same goes for the Storm’s Wrath talent and mastery in general.
Elemental Wolves - RNG
Hot Hand - HUGE RNG element for elementalist spec
Stormflurry - RNG
Static Accumulation - RNG.
Maelstrom Weapon - RNG
DRE - Think we all know how horrible this one is…
Elemental
Lava surge - vast majority of our damage and is total RNG
Mastery Overloads - RNG
DRE - again…
Though unlike enhance ele doesnt really feel much different if you have bad luck with DRE it still does well provided you dont also have terrible luck with lava surge.
So lets focus on enhance, one of the least popular specs in pvp by far and for good reason. Just going through the talent tree of enhance whether storm or elementalist, but especially with storm build, you are heavily reliant on RNG.
well unlike enhance, ele’s DRE is a burst of initial dmg and flame shock refresh.
Enhance DRE is a large portion of enhances dmg because storm strike does poopoo dmg and it is only spamed to proc DRE while ele spams lava burst anyways because it is the main source of dmg.
so therefore ele has it much much better. Besides that, ele was always the gambler spec because the whole lava burst proc and mastery. But it doesn’t really feel all that bad on ele because at least lava surge procs are quite consistent and lava burst is the major part of ele’s dmg.
enhance storm build on the other hand feels just terrible because everything is loaded into ascendence…
Never said ele was bad lol just pointing out that its damage is still entirely reliant on RNG procs from lava surge and mastery overloads as is enhancement with DRE etc. Though enhance is definitely waay more prone to having bad RNG completely gimp their damage than ele I definitely agree.
Even with ele outside of Primordial wave with with the one that gives free lava surge after 3 seconds, which isnt even the one most people go for since splintered elements is generally better for overall damage anyway, you have extremely poor single target damage.
The sheer amount of times as ele ive had flame shock on 2+ targets in a 3v3 or shuffle and still just not gotten any lava surge procs or overloads is insane. Just like storm enhance with DRE, sometimes as ele you get proc after proc with overloads on every cast and do good damage but other times your just jumping around spamming frost shocks and cycling through your countless utility GCDs. Its a terrible design because whether you do next to no damage or good damage is entirely up to RNG no other class is nearly as reliant on RNG for damage as shamans. Add to that the fact that with no proper dispel protection healers can just spam dispel your shocks and your RNG chances reduce even further. It feels like they designed ele under the assumption that you would have flame shock on more targets more often than is really feasible in arena atm.
well yea, nobody makes a post saying ele is great.
In fact ele currently is not great at all. It performs somewhat okish if you have a group that can play with you.
In it’s current iteration, while dependent on rng, the variation even in shorter fights is very low unlike enhance where the variation can be huge swings.
I don’t know, I don’t raid. In M+ I had yesterday an ele shaman that was blasting 350k+ ST dmg on a pure single target Tyrannical boss. Didn’t look at that bad?
If I remember correctly the procs were reduced at some point in pvp? I am not sure about that though.
it is absolutely not like storm enhance. I can count on 1 hand how often I got back to back DRE procs.
In ele’s case you can even force lava surge procs by using a spender. I mean in a 3min fight I tried, I used lightning bolt exactly 8 times and 6 of those were because of storm keeper. Meaning I only casted 2 lightning bolts because I did not get a proc in time and had no maelstrom to get a proc.
It is terrible design for enhance and terrible design for ele once the tierset is gone and people are not playing the 1 button build anymore.
In S4 the rng of ele is more than fine, at least in pve. I cannot speak for pvp but since when does blizzard care about anything pvp related? I have given up on that with DF and quit playing the dumpster fire that pvp is since DF and just play pve which they are also terrible at balancing at. Still better than pvp though