Hello friends,
TL;DR
Make the value we get from investing points to reach talents more consistent!
Don’t inadvertently create synergies that make choices meaningless!
Adjusting our damage profile must not cost this many talent points!
Center our decision making more around things like encounter pacing, rather than damage profile!
Tuning will not fix this!
there’s been quite a bit of talk about how and why Ele-Shaman is struggling at the moment. If you’re playing Ele Shaman in Dragonflight, chances are you have had group leaders in pugs ask you if you’re playing enhance and then decide to not invite you because you’re not. Or they may not have asked and then kicked you when they noticed you’re playing Ele.
While the community sentiment around the perceived power of classes is a whole other debate, there’s no way around the fact that Ele Shaman has some very real issues that plague the class on a level beyond a simple tuning fix.
I believe the core of the problem lies in the specc tree. I’m going to go through some of the most jarring issues in my opinion and will try to focus on issues that hurt the talent tree as a whole. There are talents that will come up more often, but these really are just symptoms rather than the root cause.
1.) There is very little consistency in the ratio of points spent in order to reach a certain talent to the power of the talent itself. Take as examples Heatwave (the Primordial Wave Capstone), Mountains Will Fall and Further Beyond: All of these cost roughly the same amount of points to acquire. But Heatwave is generally stronger than talents with comparable cost to reach them. Mountains will fall is generally weaker than talents in its category and Further Beyond has an insane variance that ranges from being hot garbage to being responsible for many of the class’s top parses.
This inconsistency creates an Illusion of Choice. None of the competitive current raid builds do not use Heatwave. At the same time the ones that specc into Mountains Will Fall use it exclusively in conjunction with Heatwave, making MWF a second-tier choice so to speak. This is amplified by certain talent interactions like Heatwave and Deeply Rooted Elements.
This brings me to my second point:
2.) There are talents that are supposed to be polarizing (as in you want to build around them) that aren’t and talents that are not supposed to be polarizing but are. Two examples of this are Mountains Will Fall and Deeply Rooted Elements respectively. Similarly, to Heatwave, pretty much every build right now uses Deeply Rooted Elements, an RNG mechanic that nevertheless offers so much consistent damage over a large number of pulls that you can’t really leave it out. As mentioned earlier, the synergy effect between this and Heatwave is part of the problem here. Mountains Will Fall on the other hand has not managed to be impactful enough to have a build around it created. For most people it loses out in damage vs Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence when combined with Heatwave in terms of Singletarget DPS. The way many most of our capstones are measured is not on their own merits but instead how well they perform as an add-on to non-negotiable core.
3.) This has been mentioned by a lot of people but is worth repeating: Single Target and AoE is a hard zero-sum game for Ele Shamans. You cannot gain power in one without significantly losing it in the other. In practice this becomes a problem as soon encounters aren’t as clean cut as that, and we are forced to find a balance that ends with us losing out on both fronts. This, again, has to do with the number of points we need to invest.
Two observations here: First off, Surge of Power is an excellent example for incentivizing engaging gameplay by giving the players options for damage profiles with a single talent point (specifically, ignoring Surge of Power is also a part of player agency); Second, the Primordial Wave Choice-Node Capstone is a good example of how the Elemental tree is easily capable of providing potent AoE with comparatively little point investment. It is also an example of how not to position AoE and ST against each other, because in reality the choice will never feel good!
4.) The decisions we make in our tree are very one-dimensional because they only relate to what damage profile we want to provide. Not only do we not have the option to adjust for fight requirements that go beyond target count, but we also can’t even provide reasonable output for every damage profile because we pay so dearly for talents that aren’t even that advanced. Giving us the chance to account for the number of targets with less point investment and instead enabling us to make decisions based on what the encounter requires, will feel rewarding and offer meaningful choices beyond simulating what capstones provides more damage.
5.) On that point: Elemental Shamans currently have no meaningful damage cooldown. Our on-demand damage in situations like the Raszageth shield comes down to saving Primordial Wave and playing the Stormkeeper + Surge of Power minigame. Ascendance is currently completely useless and offers neither output worthy of a 3-minute cooldown, nor engaging gameplay.
So please, Devs! Talk to us! We need to know that you are aware of these issues. We need talent adjustments badly; mere potency adjusts will not fix this!