Perhaps, if you’re and older shaman player, you remember Totem of Wrath, or perhaps you remember when it was a talent, Totemic Wrath, or perhaps you never knew that Elemental Shaman used to have an awesome raid buff, because it was pruned for the sake of reducing complexity.
It seems to me that in the new design philosophy of the modern game, there is ample room without braking the game to give this back to Elemental. I don’t want to pump more numbers, I don’t even want to have more survivability (git g00d scrubs xD), I don’t even want a better balance between single target and aoe in the talent tree (all valid pain points ofc). All I want is to bring something that I already used to be able to bring. For those too lazy to google it, the totem used to give like 280 spellpower (could be 3% spelldmg like dh, I don’t mind sharing) and 3% crit for everyone in 40yd range. If you don’t want to just give it baseline, it can be a talent and can have a choice node with a cool alternative with similar throughput but different gameplay, maybe like using fire totems gives a big party buff idk, I’m not a designer = )) )Totem of Wrath vs. Totemic Wrath so you get the nostalgia hit and keep the naming convention.
I bring this up because I have done a lot of PVE content in this game from nromal/heroic dungeons to raids to hc raids, m+, even did some raidleading and I did this on all the classes in the game. It’s really not easy to get a spot as an Elemental shaman; you have to be so much better than most other specs in the game (a few notable exceptions like Survival before rework), and in 15+ years, I have played ALL of them. I think it would be nice to be considered just because I bring an actual dps improvement for the group that is in tune with my identity both as a shaman and Elemental main.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been playing this spec as my main since TBC when it was a meme and I really think it came a long way since then. Largely, the spec has gained way more than it has lost and the retail iteration is possibly one of the most fun it has ever been. I just want to be able to compete with others on equal footing. I want there to be an opportunity cost to not bringing Elemental just like there is with most other specs.
I’m sure there are some other classes that could benefit from some love in this department, but many usually have other things to bring to compensate for a lack of group utility (e.g. high dps or high survivability).
If you got this far, thanks for reading. Open to feedback. My premise is trying to think what would be the simplest, most straightforward, low effort, next to 0 dev time solution to make Elemental shaman relevant in M+ and raiding that is not intrinsically tied to the tuning nightmare of numbers go brrr or not.