[2020] FEEDBACK: Shaman Class Changes

UPDATED April 9

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.

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.

• Chain Lightning (and overloads) that strike two or more targets now generate one stack of Fulmination.
• Lava Burst (and overloads) now generate one stack of Fulmination.
• Earthquake’s cast time is reduced by 20% per stack of Fulmination, up to a cap of 100% reduction (instant cast), and Earthquake’s damage is increased by 20% per stack of Fulmination, up to 160%. Earthquake now also consumes all stacks of Fulmination when cast.

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:

• Elemental Blast has been moved to the level 25 row in place of Totem Mastery.
• Aftershock now only works from Earth Shock casts and no longer has any interaction with Earthquake
• Echoing Shock now only duplicates targeted damage or healing spells.

To replace the empty spot left by Elemental Blast on the level 15 row, we have added a new talent, Static Discharge.

• Static Discharge is an active ability with a 30 second cooldown that requires you to have Lightning Shield active. Using Static Discharge will cause some quick zaps of Nature damage to strike enemies over 3 seconds, prioritizing any target that is afflicted with your Flame Shock debuff.

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!

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.

One quick Elemental Shaman change was made this week:

• Echoing Shock (talent) can no longer duplicate the Venthyr Covenant ability Chain Harvest. The value of the talent combined with that Covenant ability were too strong together, so the interaction has been disabled.

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:

• Increased the attack power scaling of the Feral Spirit by 250%, to make it feel more impactful to use as a DPS cooldown.

Several talents have some number tweaks:

• Forceful Winds Windfury damage bonus per stack has been reduced from 50% to 35%.
• Ice Strike damage has been increased by 75%.
• Lashing Flames has had its debuff duration increased from 12 seconds to 20 seconds.
• Hot Hand now also resets the cooldown of Lava Lash when the talent activates.
• Elemental Blast has had its damage increased by 25% for Enhancement Shaman.
• Hailstorm’s bonus damage to Frost Shock has been reduced from 35% to 15%.
• Fire Nova’s damage has been increased by 75%

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.