Elemental Shaman
The current version of Fulmination and Seismic Thunder in Shadowlands has a lot of different abilities generating a lot of different buffs, making things feel disjointed. In this Beta build, we’re removing Seismic Thunder entirely, and pushing more of the core abilities to interact with the Fulmination mechanic.
The recent Totem Mastery redesign hasn’t turned out as well as we hoped, so we’ve scrapped that talent entirely and shuffled some talents around for Elemental Shaman:
To replace the empty spot left by Elemental Blast on the level 15 row, we have added a new talent, Static Discharge.
Enhancement Shaman
We’re happy with the last big round of changes to Enhancement Shaman from a few weeks ago, but had a few talents that aren’t working out. Similar to Elemental, Totem Mastery has been replaced on the level 25 row, and the Cycle of the Elements talent has also been replaced on the level 35 row.
New level 25 talent: Ice Strike – 15 second cooldown. Strike your target for Frost damage, snaring them by 50% for 6 seconds. Ice Strike will also reset the cooldown of your Flame and Frost Shock spells.
New level 35 talent: Elemental Assault (passive) – Stormstrike deals 15% increased damage, and generates 1 stack of Maelstrom Weapon.
April 16
Surge of Power (Elemental) now occurs after consuming at least 6 stacks of Fulmination.
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In this thread, we’re discussing Shaman class changes coming in World of Warcraft: Shadowlands.
Read more about initial class changes in the World of Warcraft blog.
This initial post will be updated periodically throughout the Shadowlands test. Please check back here for information about further updates to this class as they are made.
Thank you for your testing and feedback!
Surge of Power (Elemental) now occurs after consuming at least 6 stacks of Fulmination.
In an upcoming build of Shadowlands, several changes have been made for both of the DPS Shaman specializations.
One quick note before discussing the specific changes to each spec, Searing Totem is being removed as a baseline button to all Shaman. Searing Totem was brought back in Shadowlands with the intention of Totems being a cool and iconic part of the Shaman class, but without significant redesign to the button to give it mechanical interaction and feeling impactful to press, it wound up feeling like just another cooldown you had to manage that didn’t have any excitement behind it.
Elemental Shaman:
The changes above should make Elemental Shaman feel quite a bit more control over what will happen as the result of pressing their abilities.
Enhancement Shaman Core Ability Changes:
Enhancement Shaman Talent Changes:
The above changes to Enhancement Shaman are a lot to take in, but we feel that the combined list of changes will make your abilities feel like they have a purpose and interact with your toolkit in meaningful ways instead of just dealing damage.
We have some significant updates in this week’s builds of the Beta and the PTR.
Elemental Shaman
The current version of Fulmination and Seismic Thunder in Shadowlands has a lot of different abilities generating a lot of different buffs, making things feel disjointed. In this Beta build, we’re removing Seismic Thunder entirely, and pushing more of the core abilities to interact with the Fulmination mechanic.
The recent Totem Mastery redesign hasn’t turned out as well as we hoped, so we’ve scrapped that talent entirely and shuffled some talents around for Elemental Shaman:
To replace the empty spot left by Elemental Blast on the level 15 row, we have added a new talent, Static Discharge.
Enhancement Shaman
We’re happy with the last big round of changes to Enhancement Shaman from a few weeks ago, but had a few talents that aren’t working out. Similar to Elemental, Totem Mastery has been replaced on the level 25 row, and the Cycle of the Elements talent has also been replaced on the level 35 row.
New level 25 talent: Ice Strike – 15 second cooldown. Strike your target for Frost damage, snaring them by 50% for 6 seconds. Ice Strike will also reset the cooldown of your Flame and Frost Shock spells.
New level 35 talent: Elemental Assault (passive) – Stormstrike deals 15% increased damage, and generates 1 stack of Maelstrom Weapon.
In this week’s PTR and Beta builds, several changes have been made to bring the Maelstrom resource back for Elemental Shaman. Many months ago, we had opted to try not having a special resource on the Shaman class, and went forward with the plan to remove Maelstrom and rebuild Fulmination as the ability it was prior to the Legion expansion. Ever since the first Alpha builds, we have been watching reactions and listening to how people feel about using the Fulmination buff. Many changes were made to make more and more spells and abilities interact with Fulmination, any sort of randomness was removed, and we’ve wound up back in a place that feels almost exactly like Maelstrom, only instead of an easy-to-read resource bar on your unit frame, it’s hidden as a stacking buff in your buff bars.
After some discussion in the past weeks, we have decided to just revert the changes that replaced Maelstrom with Fulmination.
There are still a few remaining places where Fulmination may be mentioned, but those will either be changed to interact with Maelstrom, or be redesigned entirely in an upcoming build.
Thank you all for your testing and feedback!
Icefury buffed Frost Shocks should be generating 8 Maelstrom. The tooltip wasn’t updated to include this information when all of the Maelstrom generation text was re-added - that should be fixed in an upcoming build.
This is a bug that just has not yet been fixed. Spells should not gain any benefit from having more than 5 Maelstrom Weapon stacks when pressing the button.
There are no changes to bring back the Maelstrom resource for Enhancement Shaman.
In the next build, Chain Heal should be back to a 15 yd jump range.
All 3 of the things listed above are bugs that should be fixed before Shadowlands launches.
To clarify: this is just a tooltip error. The current build you have should still have a 10 maximum stack of Maelstrom Weapon. In-game, you are probably seeing two different buffs, one that stacks up to 5, and one that stacks up to 10. The one that stacks up to 5 will be hidden in a future build. The Maelstrom Weapon tooltip is just pointing to the wrong place for maximum stacks.
We hear there are some problems with Chain Harvest and this iteration of Maelstrom Weapon, that will be looked into and fixed as well.
Echoing Shock had a bunch of work done in the past week that should resolve these problems. I believe in the build that is being pushed today, regardless of what you did prior to pressing Echoing Shock, it should only actually do something with whatever button you press after activating Echoing Shock. Check it out when the PTR or beta realms are up and reply here if that is not the case.
Some covenant abilities may not fully work with it yet. The core Shaman buttons should be working with it.
Yes, Echoing Shock should once again work with Earthquakes.
There are no plans to change Flame Shock’s duration.
Feral Spirits are a bit weak right now, and the talented version has some issues where the different elemental wolves don’t interact with some abilities that they should be.
Hello! We have some updates in this week’s Shadowlands build.
Chain Harvest will now ignore targets that are under crowd control effects that break upon taking damage for the portion of it that deals damage to enemies.
Fae Transfusion has had the number of targets it heals reduced from 8 to 4 to match the number of targets to which the ability deals damage. The damage done by Fae Tranfusion will now be evenly split to, up to 4 targets, and Enhancement Shaman specifically will receive a stack of Maelstrom Weapon for fully channeling the ability.
Primordial Wave has been changed to be an instant cast ability, which should make the ability much easier to use in all situations, and has received a number of bug fixes.
With the build going up today, this shouldn’t be possible anymore.
The legendary item “Deeply Rooted Elements” can no longer activate from “bonus” lava bursts from either activating Ascendance, or from using the Primordial Wave covenant ability. In the build that’s going live today, you actually have to press Lava Burst to potentially proc Ascendance, or get extra casts from Primordial wave.
If that is not the case, please reply here with info on what abilities are interacting with each other to cause a whole lot of Lava Bursts to happen instantly.
Yes, this is a bug that has yet to be fixed.
One quick Elemental Shaman change was made this week:
For Enhancement Shaman, several numerical changes have been made to their base abilities to emphasize some abilities that aren’t performing as well as intended, and several adjustments have also been made to talents to help keep the value of talents on the same row much closer.
Some time ago, we made a change to reduce the effectiveness of all Maelstrom Weapon spenders by 50%, and we made the Maelstrom Weapon buff increase the damage or healing of these abilities by 20% per stack of the buff. This reduction has been reduced from -50% to -35%, which should increase the value and priority of your Maelstrom Weapon spending abilities. Additionally, Healing Surge is no longer affected by this -35% value anymore, but still retains the increased healing effectiveness and reduced cast time if you use the ability with stacks of Maelstrom Weapon.
Feral Spirits has been a damage cooldown for Enhancement for many years, but has been slowly pushed down to be less effective relative to your other abilities. In this build, we’ve:
Several talents have some number tweaks:
The conduit Essential Extraction has been redesigned in this build. The previous version both increased the damage of Fae Transfusion and reduced the total time it took to channel the ability. This was increasing the burst damage of a channeled ability to a point where it was becoming difficult to counter effectively, so we changed it to instead reduce the cooldown of Fae Transfusion from 25 to 40 seconds, depending on the conduit rank.
One final change made in today’s build is that the Night Fae covenant ability Fae Transfusion should now generate 3 stacks of Maelstrom Weapon when you fully channel the ability, up from 1 stack. This should offset more of the loss of melee attacks made while channeling the ability and also give a nice guaranteed way to generate Maelstrom Weapon stacks when needed.