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
Patch 10.0.5 Changes
Patch 10.0.5 doesn’t bring as many improvements to Elemental as one would have hoped for, but there are a few notable ones.
Mana Spring Totem is being reworked into just Mana Spring. It is an entirely passive effect that is also being buffed from 200 to 400 mana per Lava Burst, which significantly improves the effectiveness of the talent.
Totemic Surge is also being buffed slightly to reduce the cooldown of totems to 3-6 seconds rather than the current 2-4 seconds.
Healing Surge is getting a 15% buff which means it will still heal for a pitiful amount.
Flame Shock, Earthquake, Chain Lightning, and Lava Beam are all getting a solid 10% damage buff which is mainly tailored to improve the specs AoE throughput, especially in m+.