Introduction
My name is Raime, I’ve been playing almost exclusively Elemental Shaman for well over a decade, the majority of that time with my guild Halcyon until after Sanctum of Domination where I decided to join Method and be part of the Race to World First. This will be my guide to Elemental Shaman for Dragonflight.
Elemental Shaman offers an extremely versatile toolkit that can cover most scenarios and situations and has an enormous amount of utility at its disposal.
The downside is however that it’s historically rarely been the best at anything and the unique utility is rather niche and seldomly gets used in raids. Combined with the fact that they’re one of the few dps specializations that doesn’t bring any meaningful raid buff means that Elemental is still facing an uphill battle at the mercy of Blizzard’s tuning team. However it’s a battle it’s way better equipped to deal with than in the past couple of expansions.
First impressions of Elemental Shaman in Dragonflight
Elemental is going into Dragonflight with a multitude of different builds that are all able to do some serious damage and offer a great variety in gameplay and have the actual gameplay between the builds playing nothing alike one another. Prefer Lightning Bolt or Lava Burst or maybe a bit of both? The choice is yours.
What has changed
Changes in Patch 10.1.7
There haven't been any changes to Elemental Shaman in Patch 10.1.7 that have required updates to the guide.
Patch 10.1.5 Changes
10.1.5 does not bring many changes to Elemental, mostly just some rebalancing of mana for our off-healing, giving us a bigger mana pool but much less regeneration to make it able to heal more in a short amount of time, but less frequently.
The biggest changes to Elemental is the 8% health bonus from Brimming with Life no longer conditional on Reincarnation being available. This is a great change that means you no longer have to be worried about becoming weaker after utilizing Reincarnation.
Ancestral Guidance is taking a significant hit with this patch, the healing per tick is being capped to 20% of health on 3 targets. This means it will no longer be instantly topping the entire party in a dungeon but still perform in a similar manner on a single target.
Patch 10.1 Elemental Shaman Changes
Patch 10.1 has very minor changes to Elemental’s toolkit but still features a complete shift in talent choices because of the new tier set.
- Deeply Rooted Elements activates more consistently, this is a change to smooth out the extremes on both ends of the spectrum. Which means you will not go extended periods of time without a proc but also not get back to back to back procs for very long Ascendances.
- Spiritwalker’s Grace now has an aptly named grace period where you get to move for the entire cast you started with the buff even if it fades before the cast is finished.
- Primordial Surge now only increases damage of the affected Lava Burst by 15% instead of 25% this is not a nerf because of the next change.
- Lava Burst damage increased by 12%.
- Elemental Blast, Earth Shock and Lightning Bolt damage increased by 6%.
- Flame Shock now deals volcanic damage (nature+fire) and therefore benefits from things like Electrified Shocks and Master of the Elements.
The new tier set from Aberrus:
- 2-set: Gain 1 charge of Stormkeeper every 50 seconds.
- 4-set: For 8 seconds after you consume Stormkeeper, your Lightning Bol, Lava Burst, Icefury, and Frost Shock generate 50% more Maelstrom, and your Chain Lightning, Lava Beam, and Earthquake critical strike damage is increased by 20%.
This tier set is very powerful and makes us shift every talent build away from being centered around Lava Burst to Lightning Bolt, more about this in the talent build section. This also means our stat-priorities change drastically.