Introduction
Hello everyone, We are Cayna and Raime. We are both long-time elemental players who have stuck with the class for the last decade.
This guide will be about Elemental Shaman, which is a rather versatile spec that isn’t the best at anything but good at almost everything. Elemental relies heavily on having the full 4-set this tier. The spec goes from being relatively weak to very strong and has some of the most consistent single-target damage available. A downside even with the 4-set is that Elemental lacks any strong cooldown and therefore has a very flat damage profile which can’t take good advantage of burst phases like the Swarm on Lords of Dread.
Elemental is still an excellent spec in terms of its AoE potential; Stormkeeper and Earthquake are very powerful and don’t have any big opportunity costs compared to what other specs have to sacrifice to do a lot of AoE damage.
It’s also one of the tankiest specs in the game with:
- Astral shift (1:30 cd)
- Earth elemental (30+% increased max hp via a conduit)
- Primal elementalist: Giving earth elemental an extra CD
- As a necrolord we also have Flesh craft
- Tauren is our best race, and we get 5% more max HP
When used all at once, Elemental Shamans can soak amounts of damage that usually only immunities can soak. With the added ability to soak very frequently with proper planning, for example, 4 Chain Slams on Sludge Fist.
What has changed
9.2.5 Elemental Shaman Changes
Season 4 of Shadowlands doesn’t bring any changes to Elemental in terms of tuning.
However, with all three raids of the expansion rewarding relevant loot and a new set of dungeons available for m+, we have some new trinket options that we will cover in the gearing section.
The Fated affixes for the raids sometimes spawn an add on fights that are otherwise pure single-target. This opens up the option to get extra value from Primordial Wave combined with Unity for the biggest haste buffs as Necrolord and puts that covenant ahead in scenarios where this is possible.
9.2 Elemental Shaman Changes
Patch 9.2 Brings good changes to elemental!
- Elemental Conduit (Venthyr Runecarving Power) also reduces the cooldown of Chain Harvest (Venthyr Ability) by 1 second when Flame Shock critically strikes.
- Icefury (Talent) now causes your next 4 Frost Shocks to deal 225% increased damage (was 300%).
- Fire elemental had the mana cost of its abilities reduced by 90% and should no longer run out of mana.
- Flame Shock now has a target cap of 6.
- Frost shock damage increased by 40%.
- We will be able to equip a 2nd legendary and obtain a very powerful 2/4-Tier set! More on this in the actual guide!
- Storm Elemental received a substantial nerf in the name of “accessibility”, reducing the max stacks of Wind Gust from 20 to 10.
- A generic 5% buff to all damage.