Currently, the Elemental Tierset and the general state that Shaman is in are extremely problematic.
It has already been pointed out several times that Ele suffers from having the most bottom-heavy spec tree by a huge margin. This basically pigeonholes us into going either lightning or fire. The new tierset seemingly promotes a balanced playstyle where we would use both, but we are so massively point-starved that this is basically impossible.
Currently, the fire playstyle is winning on both ST and AoE, mainly due to Deeply Rooted Elements/Further Beyond, a combo that basically boils our playstyle down to a two-button rotation. This playstyle is not viable in M+.
If it is decided to nerf the current Further Beyond playstyle, we would need enormous buffs to either the tierset or baseline abilities, as currently, we won’t even be pressing the buffed Lightning Bolt in our ST rotation.
This is compounded by Shaman, and Elemental especially, being so starved in both utility and survivability that the only way we are viable is if we are launched in a state where we somehow do so much more damage in a specific niche that we are above the competition by a large margin.
If you do change Further Beyond, PLEASE make sure to properly compensate our damage; otherwise, we will be so grossly behind other specs.
They appear to be doubling down on FB, which is frankly a horrible gameplay loop of praying for procs and then spamming two buttons. AOE fire is on the cards with the new tier set, but is also 2 buttons - using ANY spender in the preferred AOE build will be a DPS loss compared to PW->CL-LvB->CL->LvB->CL->LvB->repeat.
This is dire. At this point, it’s largely clear that everything about the Fire half of Ele is utter trash.
Ascendance is such a piss-poor CD that 100% uptime on it puts us in the middle of the pack for single target damage; this is supposed to be a 2-minute CD but it is pathetically weak. DRE is so much more powerful than the ‘normal’ ascendance that the CD version is basically never taken.
Lava Burst is extremely weak for an 8-second CD nuke. This is because we can cast is more or less constantly anyway, due to surges, 2 charges and half a dozen talents which proc surges automatically, so it’s been tuned practically as filler.
Fire builds dump crit, which means that our spenders are really weak. Since lightning shares the same spenders and crits 3-4 times as often, they are tuned around crit rates of 30%+. Fire builds typically have about 10% crit and it’s an extremely low value stat, as even with the damage scaling during ascendance it’s not very useful. The fact that Crit is useless for LvB but vital for every other spell in the toolkit produces an unhealthy situation where we either want to spam LvB as much as possible, or only cast it to buff other spells.
Flame Shock is absurdly restricted compared to almost any other DoT in the game, with it’s relatively long CD compared to duration and cap at 5 targets. The interaction with Lava Surge also means that if you can keep it up on 4+ targets, LvB effectively has no CD and is constantly instant cast (note this is actively better than being in Ascendance).
Effectively, this horrendous ‘just press LvB’ gameplay is the logical endpoint for fire due to fundamental design problems. Rip it out root and branch and rethink it.
To be fair as a PvP player I love the tier set and see it as extremely strong. And I think that Lava build will be the way to go since after Primordial every instant Lava Burst proc will hit multiple targets. AoE rotation will be Primordial → Lava Burst → Earthquake → Lava Burst → Earthquake. Without any Chain Lightnings.