Introduction
My name is Raime and this will be my guide for the Elemental Shaman, a spec that I’ve played for almost one and a half decade. I’ve been competing in the race to world first with Method for three years and before then I co-lead the guild Halcyon for a dozen tiers.
Elemental is looking more promising for The War Within than it has for several expansions thanks to the introduction of Skyfury, a fairly strong raid-buff that any Shaman provides. This means it’s now always worthwhile to bring a Shaman, not just specifically an Enhancement Shaman.
What has changed
Midnight Pre-Patch Changes for Elemental Shaman
The pre-patch for midnight brings a lot of changes to most classes and specs in the game and elemental is no different. Blizzard has decided to remove a large part of the toolkit while combining others and adding mostly passives, resulting in a far less complicated class with much fewer decisions in the rotation.
Icefury, Primordial Wave, Echoes of the Great Sundering, Deeply Rooted Elements, Surge of Power, Liquid Magma Totem and Stone Bulwark Totem have all been removed.
Fire Elemental and Storm Elemental are no longer active abilities but happen passively when casting Ascendance and Stormkeeper respectively if the talents are chosen.
The only new ability to be given to Elemental is Voltaic Blaze, which is a talent that improves Flame Shock to hit up to six enemies within ten yards of the target. This can be further improved with Purging Flames to make your next Lava Burst hit 5 additional targets with slightly reduced damage and Maelstrom generation.
Ascendance has been nerfed to increase overload damage by 75% rather than 150%. This will be slightly off-set by the new Apex Talent; Feedback Loop that improves both overloads and critical strikes, but this will not be available in the pre-patch.
This means that the spec has had its burst potential lowered significantly but should feel a bit stronger outside of Ascendance.