The Story of Elemental in Classic
As masters of Lightning and Fire, Elemental Shamans overwhelm our foes with a barrage of fast, high-volume spells like Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, and Lava Burst, with bursts of damage from talents like Lightning Overload and Elemental Mastery, and the oh-so satisfying sound of Clearcasting procs. The spec fantasy appeals to many players, yet it's historically struggled with being difficult to level and scaling poorly in raids. In Classic 2019, Elemental was one of a group of so-called "Meme Specs" - hybrid specs that performed poorly in raids, lacked unique utility to make them valuable, and often required excessive Mana management compared to other specs. We actually performed relatively well early on, but by the last 2 weeks of Classic 2019, we were among the least played specs, alongside Balance, Retribution, and Enhancement, drawing in just 0.4% of the overall DPS population in Naxxramas. In The Burning Crusade: Classic, new utility Totems like Totem of Wrath and Wrath of Air Totem made us an invaluable part of raids. We once again performed well early on, yet by Sunwell joined other hybrid specs like Balance and Shadow at the bottom of the DPS meters and were replaced with Restoration Shamans in many raids. Wrath of the Lich King gave us hope with the addition of Lava Burst and a major glow-up for Elemental Mastery. In keeping with tradition, we found a comfortable place in raids early on, but by Icecrown Citadel, we had once again fallen to the end of the pack. We didn't fare much better in Season of Discovery, where poor synergy between our Runes and poor scaling led to Elemental struggling to keep up with other DPS for a majority of the game mode's life. Despite its struggles, many of us who play Elemental Shaman do so because of the satisfying gameplay and incredible spec fantasy. That's why going into World of Warcraft: Forever, we had high hopes that Blizzard would learn from past mistakes and give Elemental a chance to shine with the rest.
How does Elemental look in Forever?
The short answer: rough, but easily fixed.
The Good
Fan-favorites Lightning Overload and Lava Burst return, expanding the simple Vanilla spec fantasy and rotation. Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning have had their cast times reduced by 0.5 seconds, from 3 seconds to 2.5 seconds and 2.5 seconds to 2 seconds respectively. Alongside this, Lightning Mastery has been renamed Elemental Alacrity and moved from Row 6 to Row 3 of the talent tree, and Eye of the Storm has been redesigned to work like other caster Spell Pushback talents, giving us a 70% chance to avoid Spell Pushback when hit by enemies. Fire Nova Totem has also been replaced by Fire Nova, giving us a reliable and powerful AOE button. The addition of Mindfulness gives us access to desperately needed passive Mana regeneration while casting, and Elemental Reach has also been changed to increase the range of Flame Shock, solidifying our place as a long-range caster. These changes allow Elemental to come online by the mid-20s, rather than at level 40 like in Vanilla and future expansions. They should be significant and make the spec easier to level, but that's unfortunately not the full picture.
The Bad
In Vanilla, Spell Power was rarely seen outside of the end game. Before level 60, most of a caster's scaling came from incremental increases to spells' base damage (the damage shown in the tooltip with 0 Spell Power) as you trained new ranks. Spell Power on gear was scarce before reaching higher-level content. This made early gearing feel less impactful for casters, so Blizzard sought to fix it in WoW: forever. Their solution was to add Spell Power to gear all throughout the leveling process while reducing the base damage of spells to account for it.
On paper, this is a good change, but there are two major problems.
Spell Power gear is still scarce, particularly from quests. Many of us have noticed this during the beta, where casters are struggling to find Spell Power gear outside of Crafting and Dungeons. There's also a significant discrepancy between Horde and Alliance, as outlined in this Forum Post
Even more important for Elemental, the spell base damage reduction was not applied evenly. While Mages and Priests saw small reductions, Shamans lost significantly more base damage from every one of our core damaging spells than any other class. While the difference is small in the first few levels, it quickly becomes easy to fall behind if you don't keep up with crafted and dungeon gear.
Source: Reddit: How much Spellpower each Spell Needs to match Classic
Of course, we can't just take this at face value. Every class functions differently, and Blizzard surely accounted for this with their talent and spell changes, right? Not quite.
Let's take a look at the change to Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning. The changes to their cast times are well-intentioned, but have a hidden side-effect.
SpellVanillaForever
Lightning Bolt
Spell Power Scaling - 85.7%
Base Cast Time - 3 seconds
Talented Cast Time - 2 seconds
Spell Power Scaling - 71.4%
Base Cast Time - 2.5 seconds
Talented Cast Time - 2 seconds
Chain Lightning
Spell Power Scaling - 71.4%
Base Cast Time - 2.5 seconds
Talented Cast Time - 1.5 seconds
Spell Power Scaling - 57.1%
Base Cast Time - 2 seconds
Talented Cast Time - 1.5 seconds
While both spells have the same talented cast time, they also lost 20% of their Spell Power scaling. Both spells actually had unusually high scaling coefficients for their talented cast times. Elemental was the only spec in the game whose cast time reduction talent Lightning Mastery reduced the cast time by 1 second instead of the traditional 0.5 seconds. However, this difference made up for one of the weakest suites of talents in the game - dominated by talents more effective for Enhancement than for Elemental. I believe that this change was well-intentioned, as it improves our cast times early on before we're able to pick up Elemental Alacrity. In reality, though, this is a significant nerf, especially in a version of the game leaning even more into Spell Power. On top of this, Chain Lightning is no longer worth using in our rotation until we have over 1600 total Spell Power.
The question is, did Blizzard make up for it with our talent changes? Not even close.
Let's talk about our talent changes then. Lightning Overload's tooltip is actually wrong. It's a 3-point talent with a 3/7/10% chance to proc. This is the lowest chance to proc of any implementation of the Overload mechanic that we've seen, with up to 20% in The Burning Crusade, up to 33% in Wrath of the Lich King, 16+% (increased with Mastery) in Cataclysm, and 60% in Season of Discovery. Early sims suggest that it's less than a 3% DPS increase in Single Target, making it weaker than our Row 1 talent Concussion.
Lava Burst is our other highlight. This spell has been added as our new capstone talent, replacing Elemental Mastery (our only cooldown and an iconic Elemental spell). While previous iterations had a guaranteed chance to deal a Critical Strike on targets with an active Flame Shock, this version merely increases the spell's damage by 20%. That's actually a good thing. Guaranteed Critical Strikes don't scale with more Critical Strike Chance stat, which is has been one of the spec's major weaknesses for many years. Unfortunately, this spell once again suffers from poor base damage, and the 20% increased damage likely isn't enough in the long term. Once again, early sims suggest that it's less than a 2% DPS increase.
While we're at it, let's talk about Elemental Mastery for a second. We feared it was the case, but Blizzard has now outright confirmed that this iconic cooldown that existed from Vanilla to Battle for Azeroth was removed because of PVP balance. The Elemental Mastery 1-shot combo was beloved by Elemental players, but hated by our enemies. Removing the guaranteed Critical Strike aspect and toning down our burst makes sense on paper, but removing it outright, when so many other, less-bursty versions of it exist, has felt like a slap in the face to many.
While this talent was a signature mainstay of Elemental Shaman, especially in PvP, it was also a problematic talent that was holding the class back. We could not increase Elemental Shaman damage to appropriate values in PvE and keep this talent. It would have made them much too strong in PvP. The best solution was to remove this talent and give Elemental Shaman new spells and capabilities.
Mage and Shaman Class Deep Dive for World of Warcraft: Forever
Elemental Fury was also changed from a 1-point talent to a 5-point talent. This matches similar talents for other classes, but considering our already-weak talent tree, the change has not been received well. On the opposite end, Call of Thunder was changed from a 5-point talent to a 1-point talent, but now only provides 3% Critical Strike Chance instead of up to 6%. This, paired with the removal of Tidal Mastery, means that we've effectively lost 8% Critical Strike Chance from talents.
As mentioned before, the changes to Eye of the Storm and the addition of Mindfulness are welcome, but every caster has some form of these talents or other means to restore mana passively. I still don't think that this will be enough, though. Mages, Priests, and Warlocks have Wands to fall back to when they run out of Mana, and Balance Druids appear to be able to regain Mana while casting Wrath by level 60, but Elemental lacks any tools to fall back on besides downranking, which we're very much looking to have to do in early sims. Mana was the single biggest issue holding us back in Vanilla, so I would really like to make sure that isn't the case in Forever, too.
How can blizzard fix it?
While this all might sound like a lot, I actually don't think that Elemental needs anything too over-the-top to bring it up to speed with other DPS. Like other Shamans, we already bring amazing utility to any raid with our army of Totems, and our rotation mostly looks fine (though I would love to be able to cast Chain Lightning in Single Target again). We just need to find some damage scaling, and that's the easy part.
Revert the cast time changes - This was one of, if not the most impactful changes made to the spec. Now that Blizzard has moved Elemental Alacrity, the base cast time reduction isn't necessary to make leveling easier, but the scaling difference is massive. Does it make Elemental an outlier with higher scaling coefficients? Sure. But it's something that made the spec unique, and over-homogenization is one of the criticisms of the original path WoW took.
Adjust our spell base damage - It's clear that something was lost in translation when adjusting the base damage of our spells. I can't say what, but bringing these more in line with the other caster classes will be a small overall DPS increase, but a major improvement to how the class feels while leveling.
Make Lightning Overload and Lava Burst more impactful - These are the biggest talents in our tree, and they should feel like it! Increasing Lightning Overload's proc chance to up to 20-30% is still not a major DPS increase, but it's essential to the feel of the Elemental spec identity. For Lava Burst, let it interact with more of our talents, like Lightning Overload (it worked this way in Season of Discovery and Cataclysm) and Concussion. Without Elemental Mastery and the guaranteed Critical Strike Chance of the original, there's far less risk of Elemental's notorious PVP "1-shot Combos".
Add one more tool for Mana replenishment in the Elemental tree - The easiest win here is using the later version of Elemental Focus that procced after every Critical Strike (including from Overloads) and reduced the Mana cost of your next two spells by 40%. This would not drastically improve our Mana situation, but it gives us a much better avenue to play into our role as the lone caster that has to manage our Mana or risk doing no damage if we run out in a Raid.
Add back Elemental Mastery and move Lava Burst - Elemental Mastery is such an iconic part of Classic Elemental Shaman. There's so many other iterations of the spell that the team could pull from since they've already chosen to build the spec around future-expansion design. Lava Burst is an iconic spell too, but not enough to be a capstone talent. Moving it to Row 5 linked to the capstone would still feel like a milestone moment where your rotation changes, but without gutting a core part of the spec fantasy.
One more small wishlist item - Add a way to bring Flame Shock's duration up to 18 seconds like other caster DoTs. This would have a very small impact on our DPS, but improves the overall gameplay feel of managing Flame Shock and Lava Burst.
Wrapping Up
Elemental Shamans are a small but passionate group of players that love our fantasy as the masters of Lightning and Fire, firing a barrage of spells at our enemies. So far in the Forever Beta, we've seen virtually no changes to the spec, or even the class as a whole. As the November 4th launch date, we're growing ever more anxious to see if we'll receive attention before launch. I know that some will say, "You're a Shaman. Just play Enhancement", but the reality is that we picked this spec for a reason: we're ranged players, and this spec offers a unique experience not brought by any other in the game. Elemental doesn't need a massive rework or a complete shuffling of our talent tree to be brought up to par with our DPS specs. A couple of small changes can go a long way to improving our scaling and making the spec feel all-around better to play.
