Dragonflight Retrospectives & War Within Wishlists
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Protection Paladin
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Restoration Shaman
Affliction Warlock
Elemental Retrospective & War Within Wishlist
After close to two years, I want to look back at Elemental in Dragonflight, compare it to previous iterations of the spec, and look into the future of the spec in The War Within. What changed for the better, what changed for the worse, and what lessons can be learned from the spec design in Dragonflight?
We will examine the new talent system, tier sets, how removing “borrowed power” systems impacted the spec, and some of the inner issues the new approach unearthed.
The nature of this article, and the frustration felt during this expansion in terms of performance and design, will greatly overshadow this article, possibly putting it in a more negative light than is fair to the developers. Nevertheless, I believe Elemental needs a consistent vision and intention behind its design, which it currently lacks, and some analysis of how it is supposed to fit into today’s PvE meta.
TLDR: This article is too long; give me the goods
Synergy vs. Spell Identity
- Tier Sets, which focused on either Lava Burst or Lightning Bolt, removed most choice from the talent tree, divided the player base, and led to inorganic gameplay decisions.
- Spenders do not feel impactful because most of their numerical value has been moved into generators. This leads to frustration regarding the “payoff” of the gameplay and takes away from moments of power.
- Spenders also lack “graphical” impact outside of Elemental Blast.
Secondaries and Stat Distribution
- Mountains Will Fall tried to alleviate some of the specs issues with utilizing Mastery. This was only partly successful. Mastery is still highly situational and only used in Single Target builds focusing on Lava Burst, or in the case of Season 3, because of extreme scaling with tier sets. In contrast, Crit on the opposing end is very bad with those builds but excels in AoE.
Unique Utility and Raid Buffs
- Since the addition of Hunter’s Marks damage effect, Restoration and Elemental Shaman are the last two specs missing any Party or Raid Buffs. Since the release of Augmentation, the value of our Bloodlust has also decreased significantly in, e.g. Mythic+, considering Augmentation’s prevalence in all meta comps since release.
Defensives
- Even though the popularity of Protection Paladin and Augmentation Evoker allows Elemental Shaman to survive in high-level Mythic+, it is still one of the very few specs that have to fall back on tank trinkets to survive some of the dungeon encounters, if they can’t rely on their externals. The removal of Harden Skin and the nerfs to Ancestral Guidance has left Elemental with only Astral Shift and Earth Elemental, having the worst defensive toolkit of any spec in the game.
Balance of the Elements
Elemental is a classic builder spender class, using generators like Lava Burst and Lightning Bolt to generate Maelstrom, which it spends on powerful spells like Earth Shock or Elemental Blast. Lava Burst, as the stronger generator, has a low cooldown and can be reset by random procs of Lava Surge. Icefury acts as a more or less optional extra talent, adding additional buttons to the rotation and giving some much-needed mobility. So far, the theory.
In Season 1, especially in pure Single Target fights like Terros, we used multiple talents to increase the access to Lava Burst, namely Deeply Rooted Elements, Primordial Surge, and Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence. This led to Lightning Bolt becoming essentially redundant, and the gameplay being reduced to only spamming Lava Burst and Elemental Blast. In Season 1, this was felt less egregiously because most raid fights featured enough adds that playing Stormkeeper, Mountains Will Fall, and Surge of Power became the dominant choice, resulting in the loss of Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence and leading into a more or less balanced rotation. I should note that even though Lightning Builds were unpopular, they still performed very well in Season 1.
Season 2 flipped the script on its head, featuring a lightning-based tier set, which led to us stop playing any Lava Burst talents other than Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence. This was relegated to a tool to buff Elemental Blast with Master of the Elements consistently. Instead of increasing access to spells, we instead increased the damage potential of our filler spell with Surge of Power, Lightning Rod, and Electrified Shocks. The new rotation featured multiple interlocking buffs and effects, requiring a semi-static order of spells to work correctly, but also needed the player to adjust to both raid events and the static 40-second timer given by the 2-set.
The last Season flipped everything back again. The first PTR iteration of the tier set tried to marry Fire and Lightning-based playstyles again, but was, it seemed, deemed a failure and impossible to balance. This led to a full commitment to Lava Burst. This time, we didn’t even require all possible talents that would increase access. The extremely low cooldown on Primordial Wave, and subsequently Primordial Surge, meant that we didn’t even need Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence to get rid of Lightning Bolt completely.
This flip-flopping of different rotational approaches led to the current split in the player base which became incredibly apparent during the voting for the Season 4 tier set. People commenting on those forums quickly became very hostile towards each other, calling each other names for voting for their respective preferences.
Elemental suffers from too many effects stacking onto a single generator, which leaves the spenders feeling dull and unimpactful, and even leaves them in a spot of non-relevance.
Randomness and Skill Expression
Another point I wanted to mention is the prevalent belief that Elemental Shamans’ damage relies on good RNG, or luck. The self-amplifying nature of Deeply Rooted Elements moves the upper limit of Ascendance uptime high and, even after the changes to its proc rate progression, can lead to a certain type of feast or famine gameplay. But, when looking at the actual data, Elemental Shaman is in the middle of the pack regarding variance in Seasons 1 and 3.
What seems to be the bigger issue is the removal of the player from their performance. Especially in Season 1 and Season 3, rotational decision-making has become extremely simplified and potential mistakes are not punished. The only difference between two reasonably skilled players ends up being random procs and potentially their raids DPS, which lets them reduce their kill time, essentially increasing the uptime on Bloodlust and Potions.
Season 2 builds, which omitted Deeply Rooted Elements, instead chose to build Critical Strike, leading to increased variance. This was much less of a problem because the build was a lot more complex. Wrong decisions were heavily punished, leading to skill being much more of a predicting factor for performance.
Build Consistency and the Crux of “Downsides”
Let’s examine the difference between different talent requirements for specific fight styles. It becomes apparent that Elemental Shamans always have to make trades to get what they want, much more so than most other specs in Dragonflight.
Getting some additional AoE damage in Fire builds means switching Icefury for Stormkeeper, which is essentially useless in Single Target for that type of build. We further trade some of Aftershock, Mountains Will Fall, Primordial Surge and Elemental Blast for Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence, Liquid Magma Totem, Splintered Elements and Surge of Power, depending on the Season. This usually leads to around 10% Single Target loss, for the spec to function in AoE, even after the Single Target buff to Splintered Elements.
It would be fine to be required to make impactful choices between different damage patterns and damage types if other specs were under the same restrictions. It becomes a problem if other specs only change a single point in their talents to match (or exceed) our “specialized” AoE damage while not losing any Single Target in the process.
Even when we spec completely into specific damage types, be it AoE or funnel, we are significantly outshone by a lot of other specs, given the 6 Target cap on our generators and the general weakness of spells like Magma Chamber, Searing Flames, Skybreaker’s Fiery Demise and the funnel effect of Lightning Rod.
Target Scaling and “Uncapped Damage”
I do not believe all specs must have significant amounts of uncapped damage to compete, even in higher-level Mythic+ and Mythic Raid content. If a spec is significantly limited in doing damage above a certain number of targets, it should be able to do good damage below that number and scale smoothly into its cap. Sadly, this is not true for Elemental in any of its “AoE” builds. We always scale exponentially up until the cap and then plateau very quickly. This makes us dependent on fight design in raids and tank pathing in Mythic+. Too few targets and we are essentially still doing single-target damage; too many and we cannot effectively damage most of them. Electrified Shocks was expected to smooth that transition but seems to fail, especially because it cannot be chosen in Fire-based builds due to point constraints.
So much utility and nothing to use it on
When Dragonflight was released, I was carefully excited about the high number of potential utility talents that could be taken in our class tree. Giving us easy access to our usual toolbox of various utility totems like Capacitor Totem, Earthgrab Totem, as well as some new things like Stoneskin Totem, Mana Spring, and Poison Cleansing Totem, meant that we would be able to help out in Mythic+, and flex into the utility the group didn’t already have.
The issue is that none of the various totems and general utility spells have ever felt impactful or relevant, apart from possibly Poison Cleansing Totem, which is situationally good for some dungeons and Afflicted. Mana Spring was relevant for exactly one week before it was nerfed into the ground to the point where it has not been picked since. Stoneskin Totem has a pick rate of 0.1% in raid and about 18% in Mythic+. Healing Stream Totem sits at around 15%, but is barely worth the global. The same is true for Earth Shield. Even in Mythic+, where survivability would be highly sought, all potential self-heal tools are essentially useless.
As so often stated, even the “good” talents, like Wind Rush Totem and Earthgrab Totem, are just worse versions of spells brought by, e.g. Druids who, because of their raid buff are present in every raid anyway. When mandatory classes already cover the required things, sitting on your “toolbox” starts to feel really depressing, especially when the version Elemental does bring is just objectively worse in most cases.
Being the ugly duckling
The general atmosphere in the Elemental Shaman community can be summarized very simply: “While everyone else is getting cool new spells, reworks or some form of developer attention, the few changes Elemental does get feel like an afterthought”.
Blizzard seems uninterested in reworking or touching Elemental Shaman. With many different classes having received reworks in Dragonflight, regardless of their success or not, and Elemental still being stuck in the same position as the last expansions, hearing that The War Within will not feature any reworks (at least for a while) feels like a slap in the face. None of the outlined problems can be fixed without significant changes to the talent tree, and as such, I am very doubtful that Hero Talents will have any effect on this.
What now?
I would love to say that I am excited for The War Within and what Blizzard comes up with as Hero Talents, but…
Elemental requires the developers to sit down and work on a clear plan regarding why people should bring the spec into a raid in terms of utility and how they can emphasize what people enjoy when playing the spec; how they can interlace the different Elements with one another instead of the spec trying to self-cannibalize half its rotation. Removing some of the talents that essentially do the same thing and amplify each other in an oppressive way from the spec would be a good first step, but it would also require that new talents are added to fill the new spaces.
While having build choices is generally positive, requiring the talent tree to support upwards of 4 different “builds,” all of which could essentially be independent specs, seems unrealistic and ends up with half the tree being dead most of the time.
Damage scaling between different target counts needs to be looked at.
The complete lack of relevant raid buffs or relevant utility, as well as defensives, makes Elemental feel like a third-class spec, always being more of a liability than someone you want to bring to content, and requiring other people not only to play around them for them to excel, but even just to be present and alive in PvE content.
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 questions,
or hanging around Simulationcraft, where I maintain Elemental Shaman modules.
I am also one of the active maintainers for Storm, Earth and Lava.
