With the release of 11.1 fast approaching, I wanted to take the opportunity to formulate some thoughts about the Elemental rework, the current state of the spec in 11.0.7, and the expectations for the coming patch, as well as take the time to take a look at the process in which we received the changes. So, let's compare the different versions of the spec over the last few years or so, including existing problems and incoming solutions, and finish it with some expectations, hopes, and dreams for the foreseeable future!
What Has The Rework Ever Done For Us?
In Dragonflight and The War Within, Blizzard seemed to commit to reworking specs more aggressively than previous expansions. Over roughly 2 years, we got big changes to Rogues, Paladins, Hunters, and Shaman, and Evoker was only just released, accounting for more than a third of all classes in the game. The reception of some of those reworks was mixed and often ended in the respective communities being unhappy with at least some of the changes. The Elemental Shaman rework feels like a positive outlier from the average. It was incredibly successful, both in reception and the overall design, at least from my point of view. A quick disclaimer to qualify this statement: Judging the reception of a rework is pretty hard. Firstly, people will always be upset about changes, especially in a long-standing game like World of Warcraft. Secondly, is it hard to find any hard, quantifiable metric that is publicly available that quantifies "player satisfaction," especially in a way that's independent of its power in the current meta-game. Elemental Shaman clearly benefits from its high power level in both PvE formats (even though the in-class competition, Enhancement Shaman, is at least comparably powerful), so player numbers that we can look at, have to be taken with a grain of salt. It should also always be considered that changes for a spec only work if the specific player base of that spec matches the existing community, at least to a degree. It doesn't matter how good a change is on paper if you choose a subset of players that don't fit the intended fantasy.
According to raider.io, Elemental Shaman players currently account for roughly 6.1% of all DPS in keys, with Enhancement accounting for another 6.1%. At higher difficulty, M+12 and up, this ratio goes up for both specs, 6.9% being Elemental and Enhancement shooting up to 11.2%. If we compare this to Dragonflight Season 3, the last "proper" season of Dragonflight, we see that back then, Elemental was sitting at 2.3% and Enhancement at 3.1% if we include all key levels, which went down to 1.7% and 2.6% respectively for M+20 and up. Going back further through the tiers and expansion, the general trend holds for the last few years. Essentially, we can conclude two things: The relative number of people playing the spec seems to have gone up in Mythic+, and both specs are holding up better in higher keys than previously.
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Dragonflight Dungeon Participation M+20 and up
Source: Raider.io
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The War Within Dungeon Participation M+12 and up
Source: Raider.io
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Similarly, if we look at some data from Warcraftlogs, over the range of 2 weeks, we had 35180 Elemental parses in Mythic, accounting for 4.5% of all logged kills, and Enhancement, accounting for about 6%. Even if we look at Queen Ansurek Mythic kills, we see Elemental accounting for 4.1% and Enhancement for 5.3% of all logged kills, respectively. Comparing this to Amirdrassil (10.2.5), where Enhancement accounted for 5.4% of all kills and Elemental for 1.4%, we can also see a trend for the raiding data. Shaman is generally played more often on all difficulties (of mythic raiding in this case, but heroic doesn't look too different either) and has good retention for the harder bosses.
If you are wondering why I keep mentioning Enhancement Shaman here, I think it is important to mention that the increase in Elemental players was not to the detriment of the other Shaman DPS spec. I don't believe that too many people are switching between Elemental and Enhancement, given that one of the specs is Melee and the other Ranged. There is certainly a subset of players that plays both specs, but historically, there isn't too much overlap between the specs. Looking at Elemental Shaman, we can conclusively say that all publicly available data seems to point towards an increase in player base, a better power scaling into the higher difficulties without being meta-defining.
So why was reworking Elemental so hard? This wasn't the first time Blizzard tried to rework the spec, and most of the rework attempts never left the test servers. Part of the problem was the disconnect between what the established player base liked about the spec and the modern design principles used in the game right now. For the longest time, Elemental Shaman's "Unique Selling Points" were things like "consistent damage" and a unique split talent tree that allowed players to choose between drastically different rotations and, functionally, two different specializations within the same spec. The community lovingly coined those as "Lightning" and "Fire" builds, with various sub-types for AoE and Single-Target, and huge parts of them had their own favorites, which led to a massive split in the community and people being upset every tier when "their" build wasn't optimal. Neither of these "features" promoted healthy balancing opportunities in the PvE game modes and usually led to Elemental's inevitable lack of representation in high-end content, as well as frustration in the small part of the community that tried to make it work regardless.
So, How did they pull this off?
The Elemental Shaman rework was done in 2 steps. In 11.0.5, Blizzard revealed a first set of changes and (seemingly) finished the rework in 11.0.7. We can only speculate if the split here was planned so they could judge the reception of some of the base ideas or if they simply ran out of time to finish the full rework and decided it would be best to give the community anything given the amount of outrage that happened at the start of The War Within. In the end, it doesn't really matter why they did what they did, but it was certainly a deviation from most of the other reworks.
In 11.0.5, Blizzard addressed two of the main problems that characterized Elemental: Access to
Lava Surge and consequently
Lava Burst was reduced, and so was the mobility offered by these instant casts. This was mainly done by removing
Windspeaker's Lava Resurgence and
Primordial Surge, two pretty broadly liked talents, that showed what the phrase "too much of a good thing" means. The removal of these two talents spelled the death of "pure" fire builds we had come to expect after Dragonflight, in which casting
Lightning Bolt was unheard of because, ... honestly, who needs filler spells anyway? The problem with this "mini-rework" became pretty apparent pretty quickly. If you take a spec with two "build flavors" and remove one of them, the other one starts becoming a lot better in comparison, so "Lightning builds" were back on the menu. This coincided with a change that was likely supposed to be mostly for flavor but became very impactful gameplay-wise. Changing
Primordial Wave to an Elemental spell meant that another spell, Flash of Lightning, reduced its cooldown significantly, leading to a pretty oppressive rotation and gameplay pattern. TLDR: This mini-rework left the spec in a different, similarly bad, position and led to a lot of confusion if this was supposed to be where the spec will stay for the foreseeable future.
Luckily, 11.0.7 brought with it more wide-ranging changes.In retrospect, looking at the current version of the spec, this rework was probably one of the highest-quality ones Blizzard has done over the last few years, leading to improvements in theming and consistency, balanceability, and gameplay. Elemental finally feels like a caster utilizing all the Elements instead of flip-flopping between the red and the blue spells. This has been achieved by moving away from the previous design, where most of the damage came from generators, and the talents increased the damage of one of the generators. The rework instead moved some of that power into the cooldowns, namely
Ascendance and
Fire Elemental/
Storm Elemental, instead. The pitfalls of moving damage into pet spells like the Elementals have been addressed by them amplifying player power instead of acting as a secondary entity, dealing passive damage.
Elemental Unity makes them buff the player's spells directly, and automating their active abilities received via Primal Elementalist removes a lot of the micromanaging that was usually required. Spells that divided the community such as
Icefury were changed in a way that most players can seemingly live with, even though from my experience it took some time and convincing for some of them, where they still kept some part of their identity, but also feel less overwhelming.
The new
Storm Elemental passive giving Haste instead of cast speed reduction for
Lightning Bolt and
Chain Lightning was another great change. Previously, we sometimes ran into a situation where
Lightning Bolt overtakes every other spell in priority for long periods. This is not the case with the new version, leading to a more cohesive and fluid rotation and player experience. The updated
Ascendance introduces new min-maxing and gameplay decisions but keeps the rotation feeling familiar and comfortable. Previously, we spent all
Maelstrom first, used
Ascendance, and then just kept spamming
Lava Burst for most of its duration. Now we are now thinking about pooling
Maelstrom and syncing
Ascendance with other cooldowns that positively interact with it, like
Stormkeeper,
Icefury/
Fusion of Elements or
Tempest just to name a few. Lastly, the change to the "proc mechanism" for
Deeply Rooted Elements has been great. Previously, we could only proc this talent via
Lava Burst; now, it procs from all our spenders instead, making it a fully realized AoE talent without relying on spamming Single Target spells in AoE. The payoff here feels a lot better, too. With the new version of
Ascendance, we increase the damage of
Chain Lightning, as well as its
Maelstrom generation, which in turn means more spenders, which also gain damage if specced into
Mountains Will Fall, not to mention the extra Haste if specced into
Preeminence.
So Elemental Shaman is the Perfect Spec Now, Right?
Well, not quite.
Since Dragonflight, spec design has become a bit weird, thanks to the new talent trees. A spec should be functional with only the points invested into the talent trees you must spend because of routing requirements and a minimal number of "non-negotiable" talents. To give some examples: For the post-rework version of Elemental a "mandatory, because of routing"-talent is the
Fire Elemental/
Storm Elemental. You have to pick either of them in all builds. Avoiding them is impossible. A numerically non-negotiable talent is, e.g.,
Ascendance, which carries a lot of the damage of the spec. Designing choices into the talent tree that a) are actually competitive with each other in a specific type of content, b) feel sufficiently different to play, and c) are also impactful is almost impossible. In my opinion, the new Elemental tree falls flat on the third point. Looking at the lower third of the spec tree, most of the DPS nodes here offer about 2% DPS or less. While some of them have, for better or for worse, significant impact on the rotation and gameplay or have neat theming, they really don't feel impactful, and it often comes down to "and now we spent the remaining points anywhere." To reiterate: I understand that making these nodes stronger leads to more friction and reduces freedom between builds. I still think there is some room to power up the lowest-performing nodes without limiting build choices too much.
I love the changes made to the Elementals. Still, I feel slightly underwhelmed with some of the opportunities not taken, and I would have hoped for Blizzard to go a bit farther with their changes. The Elementals by themselves are pretty weak and don't feel noticeable when used, and their 2.5-minute cooldown still doesn't align with either version of
Ascendance, 2 minutes or 3 minutes, even when they feel like they should be used together. Their lack of strength usually makes using them on cooldown the better choice, especially when running Farseer Hero Talents. In this Hero Tree,
Offering from Beyond reduces the cooldown of the Elemental, so holding the Elemental to sync it with your
Ascendance is almost always a DPS loss. The lack of power in the Elementals can be explained by their high uptime. A cooldown that is active 30+% of the fight cannot be too impactful. On the other hand, if I take a talent with four other supplemental talent nodes, I really want a more noticeable effect. This doubly applies to
Fire Elemental. With current balancing,
Fire Elemental is never really worth speccing into and is always a worse version of
Storm Elemental. The 11.1 tierset is a neat attempt to address some of these issues (
check here). By guaranteeing an Elemental for each
Ascendance and putting a tangible, short-duration buff on it, syncing becomes a non-issue, and the cooldown hopefully becomes more noticeable. On the flipside, it also further increases the uptime on the Elementals but oh well. I hope we can get this effect baked into the spec after the tier or the expansion ends if it proves to work well. Maybe replacing any of the uptime talents?
So, why has
Fire Elemental lost so much of its value, and why have some spells appeared a little out of place since the rework?
Flame Shock and all its associated talents, like, e.g.,
Primordial Wave,
Erupting Lava,
Lava Surge, feel more like a mechanic left over from a previous iteration instead of an integral part of the spec.
Lava Burst is not used in AoE at all, apart from activating
Primordial Wave, which isn't changed by
Lava Surge procs either. With the upcoming changes to
Primordial Wave, we will lose yet another
Flame Shock applicator in AoE, which will leave only
Liquid Magma Totem. The intent of Blizzard seems very unclear to me here.
Ascendance now applies up to 6
Flame Shock, but we get nothing out of that apart from the damage dealt by the DoT itself. As mentioned,
Searing Flames and
Lava Surge barely scale with extra targets because their procs get scaled down, and
Magma Chamber similarly caps too quickly to benefit from having six targets dotted up.
Fire Elemental increases the tick speed of these DoTs by 33% and doubles their duration, but it competes against an Elemental that gives 16% Haste, increasing casting speed,
as well as the tick rate of
Flame Shock.
In Single Target, this change makes a lot more sense. Manually applying
Flame Shock between uses of
Primordial Wave is already not a DPS gain on paper, so cutting down on the "free" applications and moving the responsibility back to the player works a lot better here. It just does not translate well into AoE. These thoughts do not apply to the free
Flame Shock applied via
Ascendance. Those should definitely stay for QoL reasons. Getting a guaranteed
Flame Shock even for
Deeply Rooted Elements procs allows us to avoid the awkward situation where we have cast a non-overload spell during
Ascendance to reapply our crit-enabler for
Lava Burst. All things considered,
Flame Shock still does not have a good place in the current spec design and would benefit from some additional iteration on its design.
So, where do we go from here?
Before the PTR became available, I had written a paragraph here about the lack of "polishing" after the rework and the still-existing, impactful bugs. To my surprise, when the PTR became available, many of the more egregious bugs were actually fixed already. So, instead of complaining about the few remaining bugs, I want to look at what changes are on the PTR, how they feel, and where I would like to see the spec go.
PTR is still very much in flux, and changes are being pushed every week. Sadly, many of the changes Elemental Shaman seems to have received have been either undocumented or not entirely obvious in how they are going to work. Over the first raid testing, we noticed quite a lot of unexpected changes, and we are still working on finding all changes and evaluating their impact. What I am talking about here are not bugs, but rather actual changes for which we do not know if they are just something Blizzard is just testing out or intending to keep in. In my opinion, those changes have to be treated as intentional until proven otherwise when giving feedback.
The most important changes here concern
Ascendance and
Deeply Rooted Elements. Per the published changes, the chance for
Deeply Rooted Elements to proc now scales with the amount of
Maelstrom spent on the spender that triggered the spell. With hard numbers: It requires, on average, roughly 14 casts of a 60
Maelstrom Earth Shock to proc
Ascendance with
Deeply Rooted Elements and roughly 9.5 casts of a 90
Maelstrom Elemental Blast. This is a great change. Making spenders scale better with their costs makes talent values more consistent and eliminates the potential of "positive talents" being a DPS loss in the long run. Sadly, this seems to come with losing the Bad Luck Protection on the effect. For context: Previously, the chance to proc
Deeply Rooted Elements went up by 1 percent each chance that it could proc, resetting on a successful proc. Now, it seems to use a flat percentage chance. During testing, I ran into a situation where I did not get a single proc over 55
Earth Shock casts, which was roughly 7 minutes of normal gameplay. I was previously very skeptical about the BLP on
Deeply Rooted Elements while
Further Beyond still existed, but after removing that talent, it makes little sense to remove the BLP now. Maybe this isn't intended and just a transitional state, but we simply don't know yet.
Another undocumented change we noticed is a nerf to
Ascendance. From the looks of it, the guaranteed additional overload has been changed into a 50% chance for an additional overload. This is weird. Making a tier set that increases the burst by a little only to then turn around and gut the burst from the burst spell by a much larger margin seems counterproductive. If the burst provided by
Ascendance is considered too high an problematic, then having this clearly communicated would be much appreciated. Looking at the trinket pool for Season 2, the loss of
Spymaster's Web will significantly impact us, potentially more so than most other classes and spec. We will see if this change stays until release or not, but I am not sure if it is warranted at this point for Season 2 specifically.
Let me repeat some of the points I previously made through this article:
Fire Elemental and
Storm Elemental currently feel pretty weak and are hard to align with the other cooldown. I love how the tier set addresses that, and I hope it stays.
Flame Shock spreading is becoming a false payoff, and the only button that requires it in AoE,
Primordial Wave, is feeling .... really bad. The general reception of the change on PTR that I am hearing is that people think the spell is literally "broken" because they do not understand the change in functionality. Obviously, this will change with people getting used to the new version, but I really think that the new version does not feel good or makes sense in the eyes of the general player base. Maybe we can give the spec some actual way to spread the DoT and capitalize on it, either in the form of passive benefits or at least give
Primordial Wave back some ... OOMPH, so it feels like a more impactful spell again. While we are on that, change
Erupting Lava in some form or fashion. Without any passive application remaining in Single Target, this talent is functionally unplayable numerically and purely from a "fun" POV.
To Conclude
In my opinion, the Elemental rework was a complete success. The spec has been streamlined and moved in a maintainable direction, and it feels like it actually knows what it wants to be now. While I still see things that I think can be improved, the direction they are taking with the spec in the future seems promising. This is very different from how I felt about the spec over the last few years, to be completely honest. I hope Blizzard can keep up maintaining the spec and move it in a good direction. Some of the changes on the PTR right now are a bit dicey, but they have good intentions. We don't need any further wide-ranging changes, but having someone keep an eye on the spec and continuously improve on it would be awesome. I am excited about the 11.1 tier set and hope that the last few months are not just a fluke but rather a sign of what's to come.