Class Wishlists for Midnight
Death Knight Wishlist
Druid Wishlist
Hunter Wishlist
Mage Wishlist
Monk Wishlist
For a brief breakdown of the changes coming to each specialization in Midnight, check out our Midnight Class Survival Guide.
Midnight Class Survival Guide
Shaman Wishlists for Midnight
Our Shaman Writers, HawkCorrigan (Elemental), Wordup (Enhancement), Harreks (Restoration), discuss the most significant issues plaguing their specs as well as the must-have changes they'd like to see prior to Midnight's launch in just a few short months.
Elemental Shaman Midnight Wishlist
Top 5 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist
1.
Better Defensive Toolkit Options
2.
Improve stat scaling (again)
3.
Reintroduce Agency into Talents and Gameplay
4.
Quality of Life/Mechanical Improvements
5.
Transmog improvements
Defensive Toolkit
Over the last few expansions, Elementals defensive and healing toolkit has been slowly eroded to a point where it is now only a shadow of it's former self. Multiple nerfs to our self healing with Healing Surge and the removal of Ancestral Guidance have let to a distinct lack of ways to recover after a big hit and ways to help out your allies in PvP and PvE content. Damage Reductions have also slowly been removed. In previous expansions, speccing into Primal Elementalist gave another big Damage Reduction whenever we used Earth Elemental. This was removed and we got a small health increase on the Elemental instead. In Midnight, this health increase has been moved into its own node, now costing an additional talent point, replacing another (now removed) damage reduction. I find two things important to note here. Firstly, Primal Elementalist does not despawn your other Elementals anymore (with some bugged exceptions). Secondly, this new talent also removes the taunt and threat increase from the Elemental. This is a good change on paper, especially so for raid. Previously, the Elemental would regularly just taunt some unimportant mob and get itself killed in the process. Now we are more or less guaranteed to get the health increase for the full 30 seconds. The problem here is that it takes away the possibility to use the Earth Elemental for recovery in Mythic+, using it as a temporary tank if the tank died, and it also makes it impossible to use it as a sacrificial taunt for highly dangerous mechanics. Lastly, and in addition to everything previously mentioned, we also lose access to Stone Bulwark Totem in Midnight, a shield that while it was minor, still functioned as another defensive.
The only new addition in our defensive suite and the talent that has to try to compensate for all of these removals and lost buttons is the choice node of Therazane's Resilience/Reactive Warding, both of which are incredibly weak and even if they weren't, they would not fill the gaping hole of actual defensives that is Elemental right now.
Talents New and Old
With a new expansion comes new talents and with this expansion comes the removal of a good few old ones. We are saying goodbye to Deeply Rooted Elements, Primordial Wave, Liquid Magma, Icefury, Fire Elemental/Storm Elemental and effectively to Frost Shock, as well as some more or less gameplay defining procs in the hero talents, namely the old version of Arc Discharge. All of this leads to a pretty barren rotation. On paper it might not feel all that different: Use generator until you have enough resources to press a spender. If you can somehow buff the spender, try to do that. Do not overcap your resource. Press all buttons with a cooldown asap whenever the come up and keep up Flame Shock. The problem here is as follows: After a few expansions of (necessary) removal of variance, by changing all randomness into pseudo-randomness that can be easily predicted even by human players without the help of automation like Weakauras, an example here would be Lava Surge, which pretty consistently happens between 9 and 11 ticks of the associated DoT, we have now also removed the actual not-that-random mechanics. Icefury has always been a highly controversial spell and talent, but the latest iteration on it fulfilled everything I personally at least would have wanted the spell to do. It managed to break up an otherwise very static rotation with a spell that could be held onto for quite some time and at the time of usage offered a good amount of burst movement. Even then it was mostly random when you get it, operating on a randomness system we call "Deck of Cards", guaranteeing a certain number of procs in a certain number of attempts. Using it was also interesting because a) You didn't want to use multiple charges back to back, thanks to the old Fusion of Elements b) You wanted to use it with Master of the Elements to optimize your DPS c) use the little burst of Maelstrom it gave you. All in all, it was just an interesting, flexible and highly dynamic spell. Or you just used it whenever and the DPS loss was still pretty minor. All of this to say, this decision making, these nuances are all gone now. Where previously you could think about how you wanted to use your resources, the spec has now been simplified so much that it is almost impossible to actually optimize around an encounter. And worst of all, every single change lost us some amount of mobility, which leaves us in a position where any movement requirement in the raid just becomes an unsolvable hurdle.
But enough about what we lost. What about our new spells? Well there really is only one noteworthy addition: Voltaic Blaze is a spell we took from the Enhancement Shamans that is effectively replacing Liquid Magma and Primordial Wave for us. By pressing it, we apply Flame Shock to up to 6 targets in a splash around our main target and the next Lava Burst then cleaves all targets with an active Flame Shock. Baking this all into one sounds good on paper and we also finally have a way to apply the maximum amount of Flame Shocks immediately, there is still an Ele-phant in the room (get it...) we need to address: Voltaic Blaze replaces Flame Shock on your bars, which means that we can only apply the debuff when Voltaic Blaze is available, which could be every 15 seconds, depending on tuning. If we do end up using all the cooldown reduction talents, Voltaic Blaze goes down to a 7.5s CD which means that every 7.5 seconds you need to press the button itself and then another Lava Burst, occupying 40% of your rotation already. All in all, while its promising and tries to achieve something the spec has needed for a few expansions already, I really do not like this iteration and I hope they keep trying to improve it.
The last thing to mention for new effects is to talk about stat scaling really quick. Lava Burst now scales with crit. YAY. Voltaic Blaze now doesn't. AWW. We moved some power out of overloads so Mastery might be less oppressive. YAY. The new Apex talents undo the nerf and add more mastery scaling. AWW. The power of the Elementals have been buffed. YAY. They still don't scale with Mastery and our increased crit damage. AWW. It's a back and forth really and while Blizzard seems to be aware of the issue and tried to fix some of it. They also made past mistakes again with some of their new additions.
QoL, Transmog and Miscellaneous
I think I have yapped enough already so I'll keep it short.
A few abilities just don't work in the order or to the speed that you want them to. Pressing Ascendance spawns Fire Elemental but the applied Flame Shock do not benefit from the increased duration. Similarly, if you cast Lava Burst into Voltaic Blaze does not make the Lava Burst crit, because the debuff is just too slow to reach the target in time. In addition to these, there are a good few other bugs that were on the Beta the last time I checked. This goes from Talents that break proc rates, to stat buffs not being applied properly, to tooltip issues (my favorite one being Stormkeeper reporting to give 1 stack in every place, including its data and tooltip, while still giving 2 stacks for some reason). Nothing to surprising really, Beta is still Beta and thinks will be slightly broken. But with how close we are to the prepatch, it is still concerning how much work still needs to be done.
And secondly: Please have a look at how we approach weapon types and trinket types.
If Elemental can use Offhand-Weapons and they are often the optimal thing to have for you at a certain part of progression or they are even Best-In-Slot, then why can I not roll for them? Requiring me to be in a guild group If I cannot use certain weapon types, then please give a warning when crafting them or doing a crafting order. The number of times I have had people say that they accidentally wasted their sparks and ask whether support would help them out is too damn high.
On a similar node: Allow people to transmog 1-Hand+Offhand even if they use a 2-Hander. The "visual clarity" here is really not necessary and a lot of people are unhappy if they are crafting a staff e.g. and feel like they use their characteristic look.
Elemental Shaman Guide
Enhancement Shaman Midnight Wishlist
Top 5 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist
1.
Better Defensive Toolkit Options
2.
Stormbringer Improvements
3.
Class Tree & Utility Improvements
4.
Additional Talent Tree options
5.
Better Design Goal Communication
Defensive Toolkit, Utility & the Class Tree
The absolute biggest concern I have going into Midnight is just how much weaker defensively it feels. Enhancement was never a particularly durable melee option from Legion onward, but the loss of Stone Bulwark Totem alongside the inexplicable nerfs to Earth Elemental really stings - and while Astral Shift is good, its intensity vs. frequency equation isn't suited to how endgame encounters are designed. When you add in weaker healing relative to our health pool, it's very noticeable how much of a struggle navigating an encounter is relative to our peers. When you pile on the significant reduction in our control tools (and a class tree that still feels full of pointless nodes for us despite changes), everything outside of the offensive toolkit we have feels very outdated or obtuse to use, but that's not unique to Midnight.
Stormbringer & Talent Tree Improvements
Enhancement's combat rework in Midnight is very good, so concerns are much broader about the package everything comes in, and how limited choices are. Stormbringer is definitely the loser of the two hero trees when it came to the rework. It lost the identity it had, replacing it with more random moments, and the triple whammy of losing controlled Tempest, Rolling Thunder and Awakening Storms isn't made up for at all with replacements - it's definitely in need of a second pass. Finding a way to integrate Stormstrike in (for an isolated single target tuning knob) and some form of controlled Tempest generation would go a long way. That goes for the Spec tree as well - there's so few talents available that you're looking at which of the throwaway talents (Stormbind in particular is criminal) you mightaswell get, since you've ran out of worthwhile picks already.
More Design Goal Communication
This feels like a bit of a cheeky thing to wish for - but it's been particularly noticeable this time around that there was simply no follow-up from the initial Alpha post. I loved seeing the enthusiastic first post, with each class and spec having stated goals and calls for feedback, alongside a statement of intent to iterate based on how players felt. What I didn't love was seeing us - and numerous other specs - see absolutely no follow up to that. Even so much as a "we're quite happy with where we are right now and are moving into tuning", or some kind of update on what's currently being watched would make the world of difference. Instead, every build was fairly deflating - which is odd, since, considering the size of our rework, it felt like there was a lot of momentum that fizzled as soon as it left the station.
Enhancement Shaman Guide
Restoration Shaman Midnight Wishlist
Top 5 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist
1.
Reducing the Randomness from Ascendance
2.
Improvements to Healing Rain
3.
Better Balance of the Filler Spells
4.
UI Improvements
5.
Bug Fixes and More Consistency
Ascendance Randomness
The new Ascendance makes your casts apply Riptide, and these Riptides can activate Deeply Rooted Elements to extend the Ascendance. This results in being able to extend Ascendance for very high amounts of time if you get lucky enough. It doesn't feel good that random procs dictate how much healing you can do to this degree, and this also heavily affects the power of other talents that scale off of the number of Riptides you have active at the time. Changing Ascendance so it doesn't apply Riptide or removing Deeply Rooted Elements would result in a much more consistent, controllable, and satisfying gameplay. Another point of annoyance is the inconsistency between Deeply Rooted Elements and Stormstream Totem. Both effects are tied to Riptide, however Stormstream can only happen from actual Riptide cast, so the free ones from Ascendance can't proc it. Having two effects that are written so similarly but work differently isn't great either.
Base Kit Issues
Healing Rain got extended to last 18 seconds and have an 18 seconds cooldown, which helps with the problem of having to cast it very often but makes the situations where people have to move out of it worse. On top of this, all of the Healing Rain related talents aren't very strong nor feel good to use. Totemic gets away with this because of Surging Totem, but the quality of life for Farseer Healing Rain is not very good. As for the rest of the kit Chain Heal is currently very weak and doesn't have good talents to improve on it, while some talents like Quickstream and Crashing Waves are currently bugged and non-functional. These problems result in you completely ignoring some spells and talents that are very early in the tree, which isn't a great feeling when the kit was already slimmed down a lot doing into Midnight.
UI
The new UI changes for Midnight hit healers specially hard. As the role that spends the most time focused on a specific UI element, namely the party and raid frames, the reduction on customization and fine-grained control color the way you interact with all aspects of the game. With the expansion fast approaching we still don't have options to control which specific buffs show on our frames and on what ways. This has been a staple of healer uis for the longest time and not having access to it artificially increases the difficulty of some builds that depend more heavily on buff tracking. While Restoration Shaman can deal with it better than other specs, the moment your healing throughput becomes tied to how well you can spread Riptides on the group without refreshing them early you instantly become very aware of how important this feature is.
Restoration Shaman Guide
