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Elemental Shaman: First Impression of the New Elemental Talent Trees in Dragonflight
Dragonflight
Geposted
12.08.2022 um 08:00
von
HawkCorrigan
With the reveal of the Dragonflight Shaman talent trees, our Elemental Shaman writer HawkCorrigan provides initial reactions and thoughts on this revamped system. We break down the Elemental Shaman talent trees, discussing the new talents and providing some sample builds. Join us as we predict how this class could play in Dragonflight!
To learn about the best PvE talent builds in Dragonflight for this class, and export these builds into the game, please check out our Elemental, Enhancement, and Restoration Shaman class guides:
Elemental Shaman Talent BuildsEnhancement Shaman Talent BuildsRestoration Shaman Talent Builds
Shaman Dragonflight Class Tree
Shaman Dragonflight Talents - What's New?
In Dragonflight, Blizzard is doing away with our previous talent choices of 7 sets wherein each of them you had to choose one, and is going back to the old tree structure similar to older expansions. For this system, our talents are split into two distinct trees, one that is the same for the whole class, consisting of spells that represent the identity of the class itself, and a spec tree, that is separate for all between our tree specs.
For Shaman especially, Blizzard has tried to keep the class tree to consist almost exclusively of utility and defensive options with just very few actual throughput nodes. On the opposite side, the spec tree contains basically no utility and only pure damage potential.
The tree is mostly split into three columns, the left side offering healing tools, the middle offering "general utility" and the right side consisting of mobility. All of those columns are well connected with horizontal links, so you are never too locked into a specific area.
On the healing side we get
, a party wide Mana Restoration, triggered by our damage rotation.
The middle includes
Totem der Steinhaut
(a party wide physical damage reduction) and
Totem der beruhigenden Winde
(a party wide knockback immunity), as well as
Totem der Giftreinigung
.
Lastly on the right, the community favorite
Rückenwind
sees its return, giving Elemental a way to counter knockback, cancel fall damage, and jump gaps.
Shaman Dragonflight Class Talent Tree - First Impressions
As a quick disclaimer:
For this article I am reading the talents as they are intended to work and how they are supposed to be balanced comparatively. Some of our spells on the alpha right now are bugged badly enough, that their intended functionality is not fulfilled. I will completely ignore this for the sake of the article and build discussions. It is still alpha. Bugs are expected and WILL be fixed.
So let's first look at the Shaman class talent tree:
In terms of defensives, we are able to get very very tanky.
Astralverschiebung
is already a strong defensive, and
Ebenenreisender
and
Astralbollwerk
buff it either in cooldown or strength.
Elementarer Schutz
gives us another flat 4% Damage Reduction and, if necessary,
Geisterwolf
adds 20% Damage Reduction at the cost of not being able to attack and needing to stack up for a short time. We also get an 8% HP buff from
Überquellende Lebenskraft
and on top of that we can add
Wächter der Natur
, which acts as a bad pseudo-"Cheat Death". The latest patch cycle already nerfed some of these options but we will likely still end up in a very good spot defensively, still lacking an immunity but getting a lot of alternatives.
The utility we are getting in the form of totems suffers from the fact that they are pretty short cooldowns and need to be maintained quite a lot to get value out of them, losing dps in the process. Furthermore a lot of them are limited only to your party, making them a lot worse in raids. In the case of e.g.
Totem der Steinhaut
, having to maintain a totem every 30 second for essentially a 2.5% damage reduction for the raid for only physical damage with 50% uptime does not feel like it will be relevant.
Trading damage for raid utility only feels good if the effect is actually noticeable, which I don't expect to be the case with current tuning. None of the new totems or other utility abilities seem to justify bringing one or multiple Shamans into the raid just to have access to them, which means that we will have a hard time competing with the "mandatory raid buff classes".
Getting back
Rückenwind
, while not having a massive impact on our mobility or burst mobility considering we get to keep
Donnernde Pfoten
, will finally allow us to not be reliant on a priest e.g. to cancel fall damage and makes picking Goblin less "mandatory" for certain fights.
The fact that the class tree consists mostly of utility means that rushing for the capstone nodes doesn't appear to be mandatory or even a good strategy, giving us more choice and flexibility.
Frostschock
,
Verbesserter Blitzschlag
,
Zorn der Natur
and
Feuer und Eis
are most likely instant picks, being the only abilities that are giving throughput benefits, but other than that you will just get to pick what you want, need or like.
A "general talent tree" would look a little like this:
View on Dragonflight Talent Tree
This leaves you with 11 points to pick whatever your heart or your raid/dungeon group desires.
Problems of the Shaman Tree:
In my personal opinion, the totems being limited to your party introduces friction in how your structure your raid parties, and does not seem necessary for balancing.
Totem Maintenance is boring and even totems should have a good palpable payoff. Having to regularly press a button like
Manaquell
and not seeing any effect outside of logs would be a problem.
Antimagisches Feld
solved this a lot better in my opinion, combining an impressive visual with a noticeable effect.
In general most of our utility options like
Erdschild
,
Totem des heilenden Flusses
,
Totem der Steinhaut
or
Manaquell
cost us a good amount of GCDs putting a DPS cost on our utility that adds up pretty quickly. This just means that we will need to try to minimize the usage if it's not necessary or broadly beneficial to our group, which is a bit sad.
Elemental Spec Tree
Elemental Shaman Talents for Raiding - What's New?
In the spec tree we get quite an interesting mix of old abilities with some new ones sprinkled in:
Blitzableiter
and
Macht des Mahlstroms
came back from our legion artifact.
Blitzableiter
has been improved so you are able to choose your funnel target
Macht des Mahlstroms
also works on AoE now.
Lavaschock
and our old
Feuerelementar
passive got a paint job and came back in the form of
Magmakammer
and
Sengende Flammen
. This improves our funnel potential in spread cleave situations a lot.
We get some new mechanics improving our mastery and the scaling thereof in
Echokammer
and
Berge werden stürzen
. This will allow our spenders to overload, fixing some issue with our stat scaling.
Eisfuror
got some new upgrades in the form of a choice node
Elektrifizierte Schocks
/
Fluxschmelze
that brings it into our AoE rotation or improves our "weaving the elements"-gameplay.
Urzeitliche Welle
got some better consistency with
Urzeitlicher Sog
and
Strömendes Magma
.
Shaman Dragonflight Spec Talent Tree - First Impressions
Here are some rough example spec talent tree builds showcasing a few different types of damage profiles and gameplay choices:
Raiding Single Target
A purely single target focused build, focusing on weaving spells with
Kraftsog
,
Fluxschmelze
and
Lavarückstrom des Windsprechers
, picking up all fire damage improvements on the way.
Tief verwurzelte Elemente
seems like a very strong and pretty cheap pickup for any single target build, but we would likely skip
Weiter hinaus
.
Tief verwurzelte Elemente
makes us slightly more stationary than we would usually be, but
Gunst des Geistwandlers
on a 1.5 minute cooldown in the class tree should be able to make up for that pretty easily.
Kraftsog
would always be spent on
Blitzschlag
, which might feel a bit weird to play at first.
View on Dragonflight Talent Tree
AoE with Icefury
An AoE build focusing on the strength of
Elektrifizierte Schocks
and Primal Storm Elemental as well as
Blitzableiter
. This build ends up with a rotation that is a lot more stationary than usual, but can easily make up for that with
Eisfuror
, giving 8 movement globals per minute. In general the gameplay loop here is very similar to our current AoE builds in my opinion, but with the additional "complexity" of
Eisfuror
, it still becomes a little more engaging than the usual lightning spam.
View on Dragonflight Talent Tree
AoE with Deeply Rooted Elements
With some people in the community disliking the playstyle of
Echos der Großen Zerschlagung
and
Sturmelementar
, this is an option to run the
Tief verwurzelte Elemente
build in Dragonflight. This ends up being an AoE build working well on low target counts, but introducing quite a bit of RNG into the damage profile. This can easily be adapted into a Spread Cleave build by changing
Totem des flüssigen Magmas
to
Urelementarist
.
With the latest change to
Urzeitliche Welle
(changing the spell school to shadow), this build cannot as easily run
Elementares Gleichgewicht
anymore.
View on Dragonflight Talent Tree
Funnel
Funnel is what we call it if we maximize the damage on a single target by focusing all of our
Lavaeruption
casts into a main target.
This is usually in the context of spread out target so that we cannot spam
Kettenblitzschlag
to generate Maelstrom.
This build would combine
Kraftsog
with
Flammender Untergang des Himmelsbrechers
, giving a very high uptime on
Feuerelementar
and the associated benefits.
Urzeitliche Welle
allows more Lava Bursts either through
Urzeitlicher Sog
or
Zersplitterte Elemente
, turning us into a Lava Burst machine again.
View on Dragonflight Talent Tree
Similarly to the class tree, the spec tree is also roughly divided into three different columns, each representing one of our main elements (or our resource) and one of our main damage profiles.
On the left we get Nature spells, empowering
Kettenblitzschlag
and
Blitzschlag
, improving mainly our AoE damage. This blends into the middle, which contains improvements for our spenders, like cost reduction, refunds or plain damage increases for our spenders and by association our resource. The right side is focused on improving our fire abilities, mainly synergizing with Single Target and Funnel.
With us being currently on the third iteration of the tree, a lot of early problems have been solved and solved well.
Kraftsog
has had a slight buff, actually putting it ahead of
Nachbeben
in single target, introducing some variety in the middle section between single target and AoE. Furthermore this seems to solve the old conundrum of having to try to figure out what to use the
Kraftsog
procs on for the most part. All talent nodes before the "20 point gate" feel valuable enough or have at least some use cases that would justify taking them other than to get to a lower node. In other words, we never really regret having to spend points just to reach a path or a threshold.
Elektrifizierte Schocks
is an interesting node and the rotation it enforces seems to flow well enough. I find it generating 8 Maelstrom regardless of targets hit to be a little awkward but I think people, myself included, will get used to it. I personally don't find
Frostschock
as an "enabler" for a burst window all that interesting and would prefer for it to lose the damage amp but generate Maelstrom per target hit, but that is a highly personal opinion.
Anschwellender Mahlstrom
is a node that appears as a utility node at first glance but it also fixes some problems we traditionally had with overcapping on Maelstrom, while also enabling us to pool resources more effectively. Furthermore it does allow usage of
Elektrifizierte Schocks
's debuff window more effectively. While this node is highly situational I think it's existence is more than justified.
Blitzableiter
has been improved so we can deterministically apply it to specific targets and even the logic with which it is applied by Earthquake makes sense and is pretty intuitive. This is a huge step up from legion where we were just overcapping Maelstrom and spamming our builders in the hope of getting a random proc on a more of less random target in AoE.
We can also get two charges of
Sturmhüter
which might be a good choice for mythic+ or specific raid encounters especially considering the reduced cooldown courtesy of
Blitzender Einschlag
.
Blitzender Einschlag
is an interesting spell anyway, reducing a wide variety of spells including e.g. our
Windstoß
, giving us something like an 8-9 second cd interrupt, our defensive
Astralverschiebung
, our CC like
Totem der Energiespeicherung
, as well as DPS cooldowns like
Sturmelementar
.
Problems of the Elemental Tree:
Let's get this out of the way first: The Elemental tree is very well designed and most of my concerns have been addressed in the previous two iterations.
I do not want to get this misconstrued that I am bashing the tree and want broad and wide-reaching changes, quite the opposite actually.
But also, I cannot just not complain so here it goes:
Elementarschlag
is missing a clear use case and just exists in limbo in the current iteration. I and most other people in the community are not quite sure what the intent is behind the spell. To me it feels like it should be an AoE option but it does not actually seem to work well in the AoE rotation at first glance. This opinion is not confirmed with sims or any other hard data yet, so I might potentially be wrong here, but I can't think of a situation where I would consider taking
Elementarschlag
in this talent tree. While I like introducing
Elementarschlag
as a spender, having it keep it's cast time makes it a lot more awkward to use and essentially eliminates at least half of our movement in AoE.
On a similar note,
Weiter hinaus
exists in a state where it is unlikely that you can actually get a lot of value out of it. While the idea of not having your spenders be a DPS loss during
Aszendenz
is definitely a good one, the payoff might need to be slightly bigger, but this is a balancing issue that should be fixable at a later stage quite easily.
The spec tree could use another 1-2 point node for "Lightning AoE" on the left side of the tree to be able to skip
Eisfuror
in my personal opinion. If you are trying to do a "Lightning build", skipping the right side of the tree, you need to pick up either
Anschwellender Mahlstrom
or
Eisfuror
to get to 20 points.
Elemental Shaman Dragonflight Talents for Raiding - How Strong is it?
Giving an accurate assessment of future "strength" is a very hard thing to do because of two reasons.
Firstly, Elemental Shaman specifically and Shaman in general does not seem to bring any mandatory raid utility. This means that the relevance of our toolkit will depend a lot on the encounter design and the strength of our damage numbers and damage patterns.
BUT, the damage patterns that an Elemental Shaman will have access to seem to be highly diverse and also specific enough that we should be able to find several niches to excel at.
Being able to switch between "Spread Cleave Funnel", "Stacked AoE funnel", "Consistent Damage", "More RNG damage", "High Burst" and mixes between them while also being able to switch between very high mobility, very good defensives and also bringing other utility and CC on top will allow players to find something they can bring to their raid group to improve player agency.
It not being necessary to sacrifice DPS to actually access the utility is also a very big positive point.
Final Thoughts on the Elemental Shaman Talent Trees
The Shaman tree is probably the best designed class tree Blizzard has released at this point. While I am concerned with balancing on the utility and the functionality of some specific spells, the structure is great and will work pretty well for us throughout Dragonflight.
Similarly, the spec tree offers a good mix of synergy and choice, allowing us to switch up the playstyle, giving us niches and fun gameplay.
The actual relevance and comparative strengths to other classes and specs will be seen in later stages of alpha or beta.
Interested in playing Elemental Shaman now? Check our out live guide for this spec!
Elemental Shaman Guide
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