We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Elemental Shaman in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Elemental Shaman!
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series
Preservation Evoker
Beast Mastery Hunter
Arcane Mage
Assassination Rogue
Protection Warrior
Dragonflight Season 2 Shaman Tier Set
Why You Should Play Elemental Shaman in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)
| Why You Should | Why You Shouldn’t |
Why You Should Play Elemental Shaman in Dragonflight Season 2
Significant Gameplay and Build Changes in Tier 30
If you are already getting bored with the Season 1 playstyle, which put a heavy focus on Lava Burst, 10.1 will breathe some fresh air into the spec for you. The new tier set is a major buff to any builds that focus on “Lightning Spells”, so all builds that get most of the damage from Lightning Bolt. Fire builds are currently not expected to keep up with the damage projected for lightning builds in all types of content.
The tier set buffing Lightning Bolt means that we will most likely run different builds in both mythic+ and raiding, which come entirely with different rotations, talents, and decision making. The new raid build is very similar to what we were using during the Dragonflight Pre-Patch, combining Electrified Shocks, Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence, and a high number of Stormkeeper from both the spec itself as well as Shaman Elemental 10.1 Class Set 2pc. The “damage pattern” of this build is still very flat. While the gameplay loop consists only of setting up and executing “mini-burst windows”, having a damage cooldown active every 30 seconds does not qualify as “burst” in the traditional sense.
The 10.0.7 and 10.1 changes and restructuring freed up a nice amount of points in the class tree, enabling us to take a few more “Quality of Life”-talents and to spec into more situational utility options. The shift away from Fire Builds running Liquid Magma Totem, specifically the “Wildfire” Mythic+ Build, removes the DPS gain from Totemic Recall which frees up even more points.
Diverse Utility Toolkit in Mythic+ and Raid
Elemental Shaman always brings a lot of different tools to a dungeon, which depending on the season and dungeon can be more or less impactful.Â
For Mythic+ Season 2 our toolkit offers some interesting ways to interact with the new affixes Afflicted, Incorporeal and Entangling. Afflicted can be removed by our single dispell Cleanse Spirit, but can also be removed with Poison Cleansing Totem. Elemental Shaman is thus able to handle the affix alone for periods of time without a significant GCD investment as long as the party stays in the 30 yards range. To counter Entangling we can go into Ghost Wolf and get rid of the snare via Thunderous Paws or just use Spirit Walk. We can also can just use our natural mobility, augmented by e.g. Spiritwalker’s Grace, to just move out of the ground effect and play the affix as intended. Incorporeal can be countered on a 15-30 second timer with Hex, depending on if you are also talented into Voodoo Mastery.
Ancestral Guidance is still a pretty strong off-heal cooldown that you can use to help your healers in times of high damage intake. In raids, Mana Spring is one of the few ways DPS specs can help out their healers in terms of mana and makes your healers mana management significantly easier. We further bring Wind Rush Totem, Purge, and a short cooldown interrupt in the form of Wind Shear.
Elemental Shaman offers any kind of CC imaginable, from stuns over snares and knockbacks all the way to incapacitates.
The Tier Set
- (2) Set Bonus – Shaman Elemental 10.1 Class Set 2pc: Gain Stormkeeper every 50 seconds.
- (4) Set Bonus – Shaman Elemental 10.1 Class Set 4pc: For 8 seconds after you consume Stormkeeper, your Lightning Bolt, Lava Burst, Icefury, and Frost Shock generate 75% more Maelstrom, and your Chain Lightning, Lava Beam, and Earthquake critical strike damage is increased by 20%.
The new Season 2 Tier Bonus is one of the most impactful set effects I have seen. It is not only “build enabling”, allowing builds to be played that were previously under-performing and switching up the balance a little. Instead, it entirely mandates new talents be played to stay competitive. With the old fire-focused builds unable to utilize the effect properly because of a mix of GCD bloat and the lack of supporting talents being picked, the lightning variants are rejoicing.
The new 2 piece effect is getting amplified by Surge of Power, enabling you to get twice as much damage out of every single 2p proc, which in turn is only enabled by the 4 piece bonus increasing the resource generation sufficiently to do full combos for basically every single Stormkeeper available.
The playstyle with this build is very different from current Elemental Shaman gameplay. Where currently you are trying to react to procs and just use up your Lava Burst as fast and as efficiently as you can, the T30 build will have a rotation containing a lot of “internal dependencies”. Trying to buff every Elemental Blast with Master of the Elements and every Stormkeeper-empowered Lightning Bolt with Surge of Power means that you are always busy setting up your next combo or pooling Maelstrom to do so.
Why You Shouldn’t Play Elemental Shaman in Dragonflight Season 2
Mandatory “External” Tools And A Complex Rotation
While the tier set’s power is what makes it interesting, it is not particularly easy to play around or even utilize with a standard interface. The 2-piece bonus gives you a Stormkeeper proc every 50 seconds, for which the timer is not visible by standard means in the game. Most single-target builds want to try to maximize the value you get from every proc, which means you need to pool Maelstrom for Surge of Power to empower the procs. To do so, you will need a weakaura that tracks this timer to get enough resources in time.
The rotation itself feels pretty counterintuitive for long-term players of the spec. The lack of Lava Surge means that Lava Burst will not be spent as soon as possible but rather used strategically to buff your spender casts, namely Elemental Blast. To do so, the normal cooldown of Lava Burst is too high, so we will use Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence to consistently achieve this.Â
All things considered, the new rotation isn’t particularly overloaded or cluttered, but performing it well will require you to unlearn some of your habits that you build over the last patch and even the last few expansions, and it will not be as easy as just following a specific priority list, but will require some on the fly thinking and adjusting whenever you cannot fully follow the intended rotation.
Low Mobility
The new builds are characterized by the distinct lack of movement-enabling talents that the fire builds had access to. Lava Surge and Primordial Surge gave us an abundance of movement globals, especially when further paired with Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence. This even held true in Mythic+, where the high number of active Flame Shock combined with multiple tick rate and haste increases drowned us in Lava Surge procs and keeping us always mobile. Lightning builds will replace these movement globals with Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning, significantly reducing mobility. In Mythic+, this is amplified, with Echoes of Great Sundering potentially removing half of your movement globals if you pick it with Elemental Blast. Echoes of Great Sundering in general is a very divisive talent, with lots of people hating the playstyle, so if you count yourself as one of them, you might dislike Elemental in Season 2.
Low Build Variety
Having a low number of possible builds is both a good and a bad thing for a spec to have. We have seen in Season 1 that classes and specs that are “Jacks of All Trades” and don’t need to specialize into specific fight styles and damage patterns are performing better in most types of content than those that do. This makes sense considering that both mythic+ dungeons and raid encounters do not always consist of only one type of “scenario”, but rather mix e.g. Single Target and AoE requirements. The lightning builds pick up a high number of “AoE talents” even for full Single Target builds, which means that we are now much less punished when a fight requires multiple types of damage.
I still consider this a negative for the variety and general novelty of the spec.Playing the same (or very similar) builds between Single Target, Cleave, and AoE with very few differences in the rotation and interplay of spells leads to a stagnant gameplay loop and might bore you a lot faster than Fire Builds did in the previous season.
Highly Tuning Dependent
In the current endgame of World of Warcraft, the attractiveness of a spec is measured by the unique utility and damage output it can provide. With Elementals utility being outshone by other specs, the only thing it can bring is high damage output. As such, we are much more affected by our tuning and consecutive tuning changes. We have seen this already in Season 1. Elemental started out strong and never got actively nerfed, but the buffs done to pretty much all other classes in the game left us somewhere in the middle of the pack.
Being in the middle of the pack is obviously not a bad position to be in for most specs. As a “pure DPS spec” like Warlock, Mage, or Rogue, you would be able to just switch between your specs if any of those are performing better. A lot of other specs just get by with the utility that you bring to the table in the form of raid buffs or mandatory/highly impactful utility like Demonic Gateway or even Blessing of Spellwarding. Elemental Shaman specifically has a much harder time switching to its other DPS spec Enhancement, because there is no significant overlap for weapons or trinkets, gameplay, or even just our role in a raid, with melee spots usually being highly contested already. All these issues combined leave us very undesired if our damage is not significantly overtuned.
Item Dependency
Considering the strength of the tier set in its current iteration, it will be close to impossible to perform comparable to people that have access to it if you yourself do not. The new “Omni-Token” will allow us to finish up the tier set a lot faster, most likely around the second week for most people, so it is unlikely that you will lack tier pieces if Elemental Shaman is your main, but if you consider picking it up as an alt, you might be better off waiting for the catalyst to become available.
Another complaint that you will probably hear from most other specs as well is that Blizzard seems to be pushing a lot of power into their new “Very Rare” items. While this was already the case in Season 1, where a Mythic Whispering Incarnate Icon was around 1% better than a Furious Ragefeather you could farm in Mythic+, they seem to be doubling down on it significantly in Season 2. Class Trinkets like Neltharion’s Call to Dominance are projected to be even stronger than the current “Very Rare” items for some classes, but their design means that their value is very different between classes and specs.
For Elemental Shaman, the trinkets are currently assumed to be “Best in Slot” but they are not completely mandatory to perform well. This means we are unlikely to be the first ones getting them in raid because they are even stronger for other classes like warlocks, which means that we will be a lot lower on the priority list for most guilds. This might get rectified by further tuninig passes before the next raid opens, but it is still one of the pain points for me.
About the Author
I’m HawkCorrigan or Hawk for short.
I play Elemental Shaman on a semi-hardcore level on Draenor, primarily focusing on PvE content.
Usually you can find me lurking around the Earthshrine Discord as one of the Elemental MVPs, answering various question,
or you find me hanging around WoWAnalyzer and Simulationcraft where I maintain the respective Elemental Shaman modules.
I am also one of the active maintainers for Storm, Earth and Lava.
If you want to get in touch, contact me on Discord as HawkCorrigan#1811.
For more information on playing Elemental Shaman, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:
Elemental Shaman Guide
